Ecological insights into novice TESOL teacher agency: A systematic literature review

Novice TESOL teachers often face a range of challenges that can hinder their professional development and increase the risk of early year attrition. Understanding the factors that shape their agency is crucial for supporting their growth and fostering a resilient and effective TESOL teaching workforce. However, novice TESOL teacher agency has received limited empirical attention and relatively modest theoretical elaboration. Moreover, existing reviews have largely treated TESOL teacher agency and novice teacher agency as separate strands, leaving the agency of novice TESOL teachers at their intersection relatively underexplored. This systematic review aims to offer a comprehensive synthesis of factors influencing novice TESOL teachers’ agency and develop a refined agency model tailored to novice TESOL teachers through systematic comparison with Priestley, Robinson, et al.’s (2015) ecological framework. Using thematic coding and constant comparison, we analyzed 37 peer-reviewed empirical studies, with particular attention to the early-career transition into classroom practice and mapped the inductively derived factors onto the ecological framework. The synthesis identifies 14 influencing factors, demonstrates strong convergence with the ecological framework, and extends it by foregrounding working environment, teacher emotions, self-reflection, identity construction and positioning, and evolving situations. These findings can act as a starting point for future research on this understudied topic and offer practical directions for supporting novice TESOL teachers in navigating their professional trajectories.