‘Your mum and dad can't teach you!’: constraints on agency among rural learners of English in the developing world

Learning outcomes are always the product of the interaction between individual learner agency and social structures. Recently concern has been expressed about unequal access to English, recognised as an important resource for social advancement, for rural populations in developing countries. This paper explores this issue by focusing on one element of learner agency (motivation) in a small group of young adolescent learners in rural Indonesia, who were sampled from a previous quantitative study. Through interviews with the learners and their parents, the study strives to understand the nature of their agency and the way it is shaped by contextual constraints and affordances. Results suggest that the learners do develop Ideal L2 selves though these tend towards fantasy, that they do exert effort to learn English, but this is not systematic or well-resourced, and that their parents are very aware of the limited support they can offer their children. While these constraints may help explain the rural learners' slow progress in English, the paper argues that spreading mobile technologies offer hope for improved outcomes in the future. Keywords: structureagencylanguage learningmotivationIdeal L2 selfparental support Notes 1. Two of the schools were in fact located no more than 7 km from the urban centre (the provincial capital); young people visited the town by motorbike, riverboat or bus at least once a month; the third school was located about 40 km away from the city amid palm oil and rubber plantations. All three locations would however be unambiguously classified as 'rural' by local people by virtue of their traditional, agriculture-based way of life. This is reflected in the occupations of the participants' fathers: the two urban fathers were a doctor and a senior civil servant; the 11 rural fathers were agricultural workers (6), food sellers (2), river port labourer, teacher and tailor.