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Teachers’ Agency and Teaching Challenges in Multilingual Spaces: An Exploratory Study of How EFL Teachers Address Listening and Speaking Skills Needs in Centralized Systems

February 2025 – Volume 28, Number 4

https://doi.org/10.55593/ej.28112a7

Kountiala J. Somé
Illinois State University, USA
<jeandedieusome87atmarkyahoo.com>

Abstract

The study examined challenges EFL teachers in Burkina Faso face in teaching listening and speaking to grade 10 students in centralized education systems and how they address these issues. The primary obstacle is the focus on national exam formats, which prioritize grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, sidelining communicative language skills. Teachers feel pressured to meet stakeholders’ expectations of exam success, limiting their ability to emphasize listening and speaking skills. To balance these demands, teachers adopt strategies to mediate between exam preparation and developing broader language skills. While adhering to official curriculum requirements during class time, they create extracurricular opportunities such as English clubs, dictation contests, and occasional classroom activities to improve listening and speaking. The study emphasizes the importance of addressing both classroom-level practices and school-community-level initiatives to support the implementation of national EFL curricula.

Keywords: Teacher agency, English Learners, teacher advocacy, EFL, ESL

Communicative EFL teaching in countries with centralized performance examinations for all students requires EFL teachers’ dedication and commitment to go the extra mile within and beyond the classroom settings. To ensure that their students are prepared to pass national exams and also able to use English for communicative needs, teachers are challenged to focus on curricular goals and officially recommended pedagogical approaches while creating innovative opportunities to demonstrate their professional purposes and convictions of what teaching and learning languages mean. This study explored EFL teachers’ agency development and enactment as a conscious purpose-driven practice that can help bridge performance and proficiency needs in contexts of performance-driven national assessment practices.

I conceptualize EFL teachers’ agency development as the sum of all their learning and professional experiences from elementary school to their professional life and their agency enactment as all actions informed by those experiences and targeted toward the creation of learning opportunities for their students. Following Peña‐Pincheira and De Costa’s (2021) ecological model of teacher agency, I consider that teachers’ lived experiences of the implementation of centralized EFL curricula and their individual actions for their own communicative skills needs are building agency grounds for individual initiatives or advocacy for their students’ learning needs.

As it can be argued, curricula in centralized education systems come with restricted topics, limited instruction time, and strict learning expectations generally assessed through national examinations (Rahman et al., 2018; Somé-Guiébré, 2021). In such contexts, the “politics of teaching,” defined as the “relations between and among the individuals, groups, and social roles that are involved in formal teaching and learning” (Ohmann, 2022, p. 35), is controlled by national level actors who set teaching, learning, and assessment standards. When those actors are much more interested in performance indicators in writing or reading comprehension and do not fully cover performance in listening and speaking, addressing all the students’ communicative needs requires agentive actions. Covering listening and speaking activities in this case requires mediation of interests (from students to school administration and parents) and conscious engagement to remove barriers (Bandura in Bandura in Cervone (Ed.), 2023; Johnson & Johnson, 2015; Peña‐Pincheira & De Costa, 2021).

In this study, I explored how five EFL teachers in Burkina Faso developed and engaged their agency to address listening and speaking skills needs in 3e (grade 10) classrooms. 3e is the terminal grade level of middle school in the continuum system of Burkina Faso. All students at this level are expected to sit for summative national exams in all subjects for a diploma that qualifies them for high school. General failure to those exams requires 3e students to retake all courses for the same examination the following year.

The article begins with a review of relevant literature on EFL teaching challenges in foreign contexts and how language teacher agency development and enactment could help create learning opportunities. By teacher agency development, reference is made to all efforts undertaken by teachers for the development of their own competencies for purposeful equity-oriented teaching practices (Peña‐Pincheira & De Costa, 2021). This, according to Peña‐Pincheira and De Costa (2021), is the prerequisite for agency enactment for students, defined as all purpose-driven actions undertaken by teachers to address or advocate for the learning needs of their students. The social cognitive theory of agency used in this study is presented before the research methods, findings, and discussion. The practical and theoretical implications are also presented, followed by the study’s methodological limitations. A concluding thought on the participants’ agentive practices for the teaching of listening and speaking is provided.

Overall, this study is motivated by the fact that most investigations on the implementation of EFL curricula in Burkina Faso tend to mainly focus on what happens during official instruction time and teachers’ justification of their pedagogical approach in link with the approaches recommended by the states. Somé-Guiébré (2021), for instance, conducted a mixed methods inquiry on the implementation of communicative approaches in EFL teaching in Burkina Faso, focusing on factors that hinder the attainment of communicative goals set in the national curricula by policymakers. Zongo and Somé-Guiébré (2021) conducted a similar evaluative study focusing on EFL teachers’ classroom instructional practices that hinder students’ development of communicative skills in English. Finally, Somé-Guiébré (2020) conducted a study on classroom interactions to understand how they promote or limit learners’ communicative skills development. Their conclusions highlight teachers’ focus on grammar, control of classroom activities, and general focus on preparing students for national assessments. Considering that teaching and learning happen beyond classroom settings, I believe an evaluation of the implementation of centralized national curricula should cover all agentive actions that teachers take from the micro classroom level to the meso-school context for extracurricular EFL learning opportunities created.

I conducted this research as a male EFL teacher with 13 years of teaching experience in Burkina Faso. I am an active member of most EFL teachers’ spheres, a Board member of the Burkina English Teachers Association (BETA), and a Board member of the English Club of the University Pr. Joseph Ki-Zerbo. I developed my teaching skills through personal and professional development and engagement in professional organizations. I did not attend the teacher training school for my teaching career. I applied for national authorization to teach as this is officially granted to bachelor holders in Burkina Faso. I knew all the participants before this research, and I am familiar with the general community, school, and classroom contexts in Burkina Faso. So, I understand that my personal experiences could influence this research.

Literature review

Effective EFL teaching calls for pedagogical practices that view English as a communicative tool for multiple purposes (Han, 2022; Han, 2016; Jebahi, 2022; Wright, 2019). It requires teaching practices that cover all four communicative language domains (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and equip learners so they can “effectively comprehend and convey intended meanings when reading books or other texts, making an oral presentation, writing a science or history report, or collaborating with peers to conduct a scientific experiment” (Wright, 2019, p. 100). However, such approaches to teaching involve the teachers’ ability to navigate various challenges related to personal beliefs and commitments and administrative and curricular expectations. Being generally aware of those challenges and knowing strategies to address them are necessary for specific contextualization for purpose-driven pedagogical practices.

EFL Teaching Challenges in Centralized Education Systems

In centralized education systems, EFL teachers feel compelled to accompany students toward national learning goals and objectives (Han, 2016). The general expectations for all teachers and learners in such contexts become the number one priority for all educational stakeholders and challenge teachers to devote more instruction time and attention to progress towards them (Haider & Chowdhury, 2012; Rahman & Pandian, 2018; Some-Guiébré, 2021).

The biggest challenge in effectively implementing national EFL curricula while paying attention to students’ communicative needs is the national assessment format, which sometimes solely focuses on evaluating students’ ability to perform academic skills (Barabadi & Razmjoo, 2016; Diouani, 2020). In various classroom observations and interviews conducted with EFL teachers in different countries, national assessment formats were considered the biggest challenge for listening and speaking lessons as they mostly focus on reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary (Biseko et al., 2020; Nagy & Kovács, 2022; Yung, 2023; Zongo & Somé-Guiébré, 2021). Hence, students were reported showing limited to no participation in speaking and listening activities, leading to teachers’ focus on what counts for the national examinations (Han, 2016; Yung, 2023). This macro-level challenge is reportedly enforced by community and school (meso-level) expectations that put extra pressure on EFL teachers to focus on curricular activities related to the content of the national assessment, as it has implications for their investments in their students’ education (Han, 2016). A failure in those exams sometimes means paying school fees for repeated grades and other charges that come with it. Excellent grades in them also mean chances for scholarships and merit rewards. So, for parents and students, preparation for national exams becomes a number one priority that EFL teachers have to manage.

Logistics constraints are the other challenges that EFL teachers face in centralized education systems (Han, 2016; Zongo & Somé-Guiébré, 2021). In such contexts, teachers generally report being pressured to cover all curricular content within a specific time (Han, 2016) without being offered the books and adequate materials to teach accordingly (Somé-Guiébré, 2021). In some cases, the curricula require that they cover listening activities while schools do not even have electricity, let alone sound systems and audio resources for listening lessons. When this challenge is deepened by class size and the teachers’ lack of training to conduct learner-focused activities in all four domains (Han, 2016; Zongo & Somé-Guiébré, 2021), teachers sometimes resort to teacher-centered teaching approaches focused on meeting the minimum required by the national curricula.

Actions to navigate the above challenges depend on the level of agency skills of the EFL teachers. Non-agentive teachers would passively express needs and wait for administrative and policy actors’ responses (Somé-Guiébré, 2021; Zongo & Somé-Guiébré, 2021), while agentive teachers express needs and take further actions to create learning opportunities. Such agentive teachers act based on their professional beliefs and are able to go beyond classrooms, school and community context realities, and national challenges to create learning opportunities for skills that are hard to cover in normal instructional conditions (Davis & Howlett, 2022; Safari, 2023). This study focuses on possible EFL teachers’ agentive actions that can specifically facilitate listening and speaking skills development.

Language Teacher Agency

To produce expected national results while working toward individual professional goals for teaching and learning, EFL teachers are challenged to enact agency for their cognitive needs and engage stakeholders for consensual solutions to students’ needs (Davis & Howlett, 2022; Gu et al., 2022; Kayi-Aydar, 2019; Larsen-Freeman, 2019; Palmer & Martínez, 2013; Peña‐Pincheira & De Costa, 2021). They are challenged to act on themselves and their teaching environments (Bandura in Cervone (Ed.), 2023) for solutions to curricular, administrative, community, and classroom challenges to effective and inclusive teaching and learning (Gu et al., 2022; Imants & Van der Wal, 2020; Riazi & Razavipour, 2011). For Imants and Van der Wal (2020), language teachers’ agency is situated in actions that teachers take in complex contexts for their professional development and teaching needs.

Teaching agentively calls for solution-oriented thinking about the learning environments and collaboration with other stakeholders to implement those solutions (Davis & Howlett, 2022). According to Peña‐Pincheira and De Costa (2021), agentive teaching practices call for teachers’ use of their cognitive assets to address classroom, school/community, and national challenges (micro-, meso-, and macro-levels) for equitable learning opportunities in the school ecosystem. To do so, teachers are expected to develop a strong purpose for teaching, acquire the necessary competencies, engage in reflexive practices in their profession, and be able to act autonomously for better teaching and learning (Davis & Howlett, 2022; Peña‐Pincheira & De Costa, 2021). In this sense, agency engagement calls for cognitive development initiative and social actions for solutions, hence the use of Bandura’s social cognitive theory of agency as a theoretical framework (Bandura in Cervone (Ed.), 2023; Bandura, 2015; Bandura, 2001).

Peña‐Pincheira and De Costa (2021) used their analytic ecological model of teacher agency to investigate how an English as a foreign language teacher from Chile responds to challenges related to teaching English in the Chilean context. Focusing on that single case, they strived to test their model for an understanding of how their single case developed their agentive teacher identity for justice-oriented work in second language education. For this purpose, Peña‐Pincheira and De Costa (2021) started with a presentation of the general education context of Chile and its challenges, highlighting the national education system’s expectation of  English teachers to prepare Chileans for “the needs of a globalized world, with English constructed as the language that affords access to enhanced labor and professional opportunities” (p. 5), the defunding of school that creates challenges for access to resources, and the “issues of segregation, social inequality, and extreme poverty that affected Chile” and the students (p. 6). To explain her agentive commitment to justice-oriented teaching in such a context, their case relied on her purpose for change, her lived experiences and need for change for better experiences for her students, and “her role, actions, and social responsibility as an educator” to act for the learning needs of all students (Peña‐Pincheira & De Costa, 2021, p. 8). A main criticism of Peña‐Pincheira and De Costa (2021) is that they did not focus on how the case study mobilized her agency to act in teaching contexts. The focus was to understand her past learning experiences and the influences on her journey to the field of language teaching. So, their case study explored circumstances contributing to the teacher’s agency development rather than their agentive teaching practice.

Similar to Peña‐Pincheira and De Costa (2021), Davis and Howlett (2022) used an ecological perspective on language teacher agency to understand the agentive practice of six world language teachers in their efforts to advocate for the English learning needs of “multilingual students in dominant monolingual spaces” in America (p. 3). Their conclusion highlights that at the meso level, teachers used their “embodied culturally and linguistically responsive dispositions” as gained agency assets and invested them in their teaching practice to develop and maintain continuous relationships with their students (Davis & Howlett, 2022, p. 5). At the school and administrative level, their participants reported using their influencing power to build relationships with and push “their school and district administrations to obtain resources for their students” because of unequal equipment of their schools compared to others (Davis & Howlett, 2022, p. 6). Based on the findings, Davis and Howlett (2022) argue that the ecological frame of language teacher agency requires teachers to have administrative competence, sociopolitical reflexivity, and the ability to perceive the urgency and necessity to act for their multilingual students. As practical implications, they call on language teachers to view themselves as activists and build their voices by forming a collective community of actions.

Agency development, as presented in Peña‐Pincheira and De Costa (2021) and Davis and Howlett (2022), is a long process that involves positionality on equity issues, investment in personal training, and professional development to gain the resources and skills needed to act for the equity purpose that one withhold. Enacting the developed agency for withheld purposes requires making learner-centered choices, influencing, resisting, or taking stances against policy and administrative requirements that do not favor purpose-driven actions (Kayi-Aydar, 2019). Agency enactment, in this case, involves daily actions ranging from “decision-making during classroom instruction to voicing a concern at a staff/ faculty meeting” (Kayi-Aydar, 2019, p. 4). Kayi-Aydar (2019) considers language teachers’ agency enactment as the actions that teachers undertake first to develop their identities (professional agency that can be collective, non-policy context agency enactment) and then act to influence or transform their working environment (policy implementation agency with a focus on teachers as individuals).

In this study, teachers were asked to reflect on shortcomings and positive pedagogical practices that they experienced in the teaching of listening and speaking, purpose-driven actions that they took from their past teachers for the development of their professional agency, and the current stances they take in schools to create learning opportunities for their students.

Theoretical Framework

This research is grounded in the social cognitive theory of agency and transformative actions (Bandura, 2015). This goal-oriented theory focuses on self-efficacy and the importance of collaboration for attaining individual goals. Bandura (2001) posits that agents are those who critically reflect on their position within social and institutional conditions and collaborate with people “who have access to resources or expertise or who wield influence and power to act at their behest to secure the outcomes they desire,” and coordinate actions with other actors (Bandura, 2001, p. 13).

In this theory, the EFL teacher, as an agent, becomes the initiator of actions and the identifier of the environment and actors with whom those actions can be implemented. Bandura believes that the contexts and environments for agentive actions can be imposed, selected, or created (Bandura in Cervone (Ed.), 2023), and it is up to the change agent to determine where actions are needed. Imposed contexts refer to regulated institutional spaces. Selected context refers to individual selective behaviors in imposed spaces, and created contexts are outside instructional boundaries.

This theory helps focus on teachers’ purposeful development of their professional identity and individual or collaborative initiatives to address personal and institutional challenges to teaching listening and speaking in imposed contexts. It helps focus on proactive actions for solutions to classroom, school, community, or national challenges. To this end, this article answers three main questions:

  1. How did five EFL teachers in Burkina Faso develop their listening and speaking skills and pedagogical approaches to teaching them?
  2. What challenges do they face teaching listening and speaking in 3e classrooms?
  3. How do they engage their agency to create opportunities for students?

Methods

This hermeneutic phenomenological study investigates five Burkina EFL teachers’ agency development and enactment for teaching listening and speaking in an exam classroom. Lindseth and Norberg (2022) define phenomenology methods as approaches used to explore the meanings of lived experiences of phenomena, elucidating that those phenomena can be “Natural phenomena, social processes, events, human reactions, discourses, practices” and any contextual situation that affects or engages different individuals (p. 884). Depending on their philosophical stance, a phenomenological researcher can use the early Husserlian descriptive approach to produce a thematic description of the essence and structure of the lived experiences (Starks & Trinidad, 2007) or the improved hermeneutic Husserlian approach that combines a descriptive and interpretive examination of the common traits found in individuals’ experiences of the phenomena (Van Manen, 1997). For Van Manen (1997), the hermeneutic phenomenological researcher’s role is to “construct a phenomenological text that possesses concreteness, evocativeness, intensity, tone, and epiphany” for a holistic understanding of the lived experiences of research participants (p. 368).

Using the hermeneutic phenomenological approach, this paper questions five EFL teachers’ lived experiences for the development of their listening and speaking skills and their current agentive practices to develop their students’ listening and speaking skills. I used Peña‐Pincheira and De Costa’s (2021) ecological model of teacher agency for educational justice to structure the interview protocol around the teachers’ preparedness for listening and speaking courses and their navigation of challenges to teach them. The model considers teachers’ purpose, reflexive skills, competencies, and sense of autonomy as key elements of their agency. According to Peña‐Pincheira and De Costa, enacting those elements is influenced by external micro-context challenges (classroom realities), meso-context realities (school and community), and macro-context factors (national challenges).

Research Context

Burkina Faso is a former French colony with more than 60 national language communities (INSD 2022). Its school system was inherited from France in the 1960s, with the French language still being the medium of instruction and the dominant school language. Its education system is organized following the national decentralization policy. Strategic planning of teaching and learning, as well as the assessment of the attainment of learning goals in middle school, are done by the Ministry of National Education, Literacy, and the Promotion of National Languages (MENAPLN). Supervision of the operational implementation of curricula is hierarchically monitored and evaluated by directorates at the regional, provincial, and municipal levels. Progressing from primary school to middle school, from middle school to high school, and from high school to university is conditioned by satisfactory results in national examinations organized for the evaluation of curricula goals’ achievements. All students of Burkina Faso sit for the same tests in all subjects in their programs. Those examinations generally last for a week and failure requires repeating the whole academic year for the same exams.

English is introduced in middle school (grade 7), aiming at the acquisition of knowledge for academic and social needs. The Current national curricula for the four grades of middle school (grades 7 to 10) are a revision following a regional higher education reform project focusing on a competency-based approach (MENAPLN, 2021). According to the official curricula of post-primary education, after grade 10, each student must be able to express themselves both orally and in writing, respecting the basic rules of the language and with the ability to listen to, read, and understand oral and written productions in different everyday situations (MENAPLN, 2021, my translation).

The epistemological and didactic expectations for EFL teachers in middle school indicate that they must prepare each middle school student to be a citizen who has acquired oral and written language and communication skills in English that enable them to pursue studies in general or technical secondary education after grade 10 (MENAPLN, 2021, my translation). To reach this operational EFL goal, the national curriculum designers recommend the communicative approach, emphasizing the need for classroom activities to focus on interaction, the use of authentic materials (materials not originally designed for a language course: a press article, an extract from a radio program or film, a photo, etc.) and the contextualization of learning situations to prepare learners for communicative needs outside the classroom (MENAPLN, 2021, my translation).

For these national expectations, detailed syllabi are designed for each subject with an annual teaching and assessment agenda that should be followed nationally. In grade 10, national actors plan a unit for each month, from October to May, with specific orientation on time that should be allotted to teaching, formative assessments, and revision of learning. Teachers are expected to follow the national plan, use national instruction procedures, and complete all expected classroom-level evaluations. Flexibility is only given for the adaptation or creation of didactic resources that match the social realities of the learners. The limited maneuver provided leads some teachers to focus on what is required. Exploring how participants in this research navigate this context for the teaching of listening and learning can lead to lessons that could inform other teachers.

Participants

According to Creswell and Poth (2018), a phenomenological study focuses on making sense of multiple individuals’ experiences of a phenomenon. Participants in such a study should have experienced the same phenomenon to be able to share their lived experiences. In this study, the participants targeted needed to have the same educational and teacher training background. The inclusion criteria were:

  • be a certified EFL teacher in Burkina Faso;
  • have at least three years of teaching experience in middle school after certification at the national teacher training school and;
  • have experience teaching English in 3e classrooms.

The rationale for the required three years of teaching experience after certification is that agency development and mainly enactment require relationship and network building (Peña‐Pincheira & De Costa, 2021). The assumption made is that for their first and second year of teaching after certification, EFL teachers would still be in the experimentation of concepts learned in teacher education programs and would also be learning to know their students, the school context, and its actors, as well as the learner’s community. Also, a national challenge that EFL teachers face in Burkina Faso after completion of initial training is a delay in their status readjustment from teacher candidate or trainee to full civil servants. This status readjustment generally limits their financial capacity to act alone, should they have the will to acquire resources for teaching and learning. After certification, some EFL teachers spend two years with an internship stipend waiting for the readjustment and payments of previous salaries. With a minimum requirement of three years, I wanted to ensure that they got the opportunity to settle in their school and learners’ community and were also able to use personal resources when possible.

After the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process for ethical considerations, participants were recruited through the Burkina English Teachers Association’s (BETA) WhatsApp platform. A Google form was designed with the above inclusion and exclusion criteria. The form was sent to the BETA executive board and some EFL teachers I targeted because they met the criteria. Six days after sending the form, a reminder message was sent through the same channels I initially used. On the eighth day, the form was closed for submission with eight (08) registered volunteers.

Data from that survey were analyzed in an Excel file using the inclusion criteria. One participant was disqualified because he had two years of teaching experience after certification. Five participants were selected for the interview because they met the criteria and reported teaching a 3e class during the school year 2023-2024. Two participants were put on a waiting list because one took an administrative position in 2024, after 12 years of teaching, and the other was not teaching a 3e classroom in 2023-2024.

Selected participants were contacted for a recorded one-hour Zoom meeting on their available day and time. Four participants responded with their preferences. One selected participant teaching in the rural area promised to reach back but did not. He was replaced with the participant teaching in a rural area in the academic year 2023-2024, but only in high school. The participants who were finally interviewed were four men and one woman. They all studied in Burkina Faso from primary school to university. They have at least a bachelor’s degree in English and one year of theoretical and one year of practical training through the national teacher training school.

Names used in this study are given to participants to guarantee anonymity. The pseudonyms and teacher profiles of the five participants are presented in the following table.

Table 1. Research participants

Name Total teaching experience Experience prior to certification Experience after certification Academic year 2023-2024
Donzawl 11 years 1 year 10 years She is the only female participant in this research. She teaches a 3e classroom in a public vocational school in a rural area.
Saanso 9 years 1 year 8 years He teaches a 3e classroom in a rural public general education school and has a part-time teaching position in a private general high school in the capital city.
Kobkou 13 years 5 years 8 years He teaches a 3e classroom in a general education public school in a rural area and one in a general education private school in the capital city.
Guura 8 years 5 years 3 years He teaches a 3e classroom in a vocational education public school in the capital city and another in a general education private school in the same city.
Bèkounibè 10 years 7 years 3 years He has seven years of teaching in a 3e classroom. This year, he teaches in high school and some middle school classes in rural areas but does not have a 3e classroom.

Data Sources

All interviews were conducted via Zoom and recorded with the participant’s consent. Recording consisted of audio, video, and automatic transcript generation. The shortest interview lasted 43 minutes and 16 seconds, while the longest lasted for one hour and 22 minutes because of different internet issues. The three others were at least one hour long. Generated transcripts were cleaned up, converted from TFF format to Word, and proofread using audio or video files. Proofread versions were shared with each participant for feedback and approval. All participants shared their feedback, ranging from astonishment at how their oral utterances look in written form to suggestions that I correct some grammar mistakes made in some utterances. After reading the transcripts, one participant shared four additional recommendations via WhatsApp targeting actions teachers, curriculum designers, and national education actors should take.

Data Analysis

I followed Van Manen’s (1990) three levels of hermeneutic phenomenological procedures. The first level focuses on identifying themes through a thematic approach. At this holistic level, Van Manen (1990) recommends a reading of participants’ data for sentences or phrases that help “capture the fundamental meaning or main significance of the text as a whole” (p. 93). The second level of analysis calls for selective reading of statements that “seem particularly essential or revealing about the phenomenon or experience being described” (Van Manen, 1990, p. 93). The third level of analysis is a detailed reading focusing on what each “sentence or sentence cluster reveals about the phenomenon or experience being described” (Van Manen, 1990, p. 93).

For the first reading, I focused on general ideas about their experiences of listening and speaking classes in 3e as English learners, their experiences at the university as students in the Department of Anglophone Studies, and their trainee experience in the teacher training program. I also tried to picture their teaching environment, its challenges, and the actions they reported taking. Descriptive codes were used at this level, specifying whether their statement was a challenge or a solution and whether that challenge or solution was at the classroom, school/community, or national level.

For the second level, I tried to identify categories that stood out across participants’ statements concerning their listening and speaking skills development, their current teaching contexts, and their approaches to teaching listening and speaking. At the third level, I focused on specific statements about their learner, students, teacher candidates, and in-service teacher experiences with listening and speaking activities.

Findings

Referring to the three research questions, the finding revealed participants felt less supported in official teaching and learning spaces for the development of listening and speaking skills. From middle school to university, they shared that their classroom experiences focused on reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary. Pedagogically, they also thought their teacher training experiences did not focus on how to teach listening and speaking. They believed they developed their listening and speaking skills through engagement in extracurricular activities carried out in English and pedagogical skills through personal training and professional development opportunities. As for the challenges to teaching listening and speaking, they felt limited by classroom, administrative, and national expectations that are assessment-oriented. To address those, they enact agency to create opportunities for the listening and speaking extracurricular experiences they had.

EFL Teachers’ Listening and Speaking Skills Development Experiences

All participants reported having limited to no experience with listening lessons when they were middle and high school learners. Donzawl, for instance, reported that her learners’ experience was “basically focused on grammar, reading, and comprehension. But not listening.” Saanso also does not recall any learner experience targeting speaking, as most EFL teachers “were doing something like bringing you to finish your first cycle well and get your BEPC.” He recalled experiences of speaking activities when he moved to a semi-urban area for high school because there, his “teachers initiated English clubs” that gave them the “opportunities to express [themselves] often.”

Bekounibè made his experience more general by explaining that “we learned our English not only from our teachers but also from our own experiences and devotion.” Donzawl reported that to address the gap left by the school, she used to “listen to English outside the class” and believes she “learned more outside the class than inside.” Saanso shared similar experiences. He started participating in English clubs’ activities in high school and saw that “opportunities to speak were given to those willing.” Gura and Kobkou also reported occasional experiences of courses dedicated to listening or speaking. They agree with the other participants that teaching in 3e classrooms focused on grammar rules, reading comprehension, and vocabulary.

As learners, participants reported having limited opportunities to develop their listening and speaking skills. They reported the occasional initiative of some EFL teachers who used to bring a tape recorder and cassettes to make them listen to songs. Sanso sang an English song that his middle school teacher taught them using a tape. He also shares memories of the English club his teachers helped create in high school. Kobkou recalled his teachers’ initiative in 2008 when he made them listen to Obama’s speech.

Pedagogical Preparedness for Listening and Speaking

Participants had a similar learner experience in the teacher training program, although they were admitted during different academic years. According to them, courses that prepare them for pedagogical practices in the classroom focus on reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary. After the teacher training school, Guura reported that he “didn’t feel prepared” to teach listening and speaking. He deplored that teacher trainers did “not emphasize how to teach listening and speaking for his cohort.” He reported reaching out to other teacher candidates and in-service teachers to learn how to teach listening and speaking. However, “They told me it was the same thing. Inspectors would come and emphasize the grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension lessons; after that, they leave. And they will also expect teachers to use those lesson plans on the examination days.”

Saanso confirmed the tacit practice of teacher certification exams consisting of planning reading comprehension, grammar, or vocabulary lessons. He reported that few inspectors expect to see a teacher candidate teaching listening or speaking lessons during classroom observations. According to Saanso:

Since we all believe that it will be [laugh], let’s use the words: if you try to do a listening lesson during the field visits, you will get some problems. So, people avoid it. If you contact an inspector or an advisor, they will say that maybe 1% of the trainees conduct listening lessons during visits [laugh]. Most of them, most of us, will do something like grammar and vocabulary lessons in middle school and reading comprehension in high school.

Participants reported having cognitive and pedagogical gaps in approaching listening and speaking lessons because, as learners, their teachers didn’t focus on those skills. As teacher candidates, their trainers did not focus on them. Those gaps were filled with agentive actions for the self. Donzawl, for instance, reported having difficulties expressing herself at the early stages of her teaching career, let alone teaching those skills. However, with time and agency enactment for the self, she reported using resources online to improve. She believes that to teach listening and speaking:

We have everything available on the internet to develop teaching skills. I was not satisfied with the way I taught my children. I wanted to engage them more and make them interested in the language. I wanted my students to be excited whenever they had English classes with me. This is what drove me to look and push forward to go to YouTube and Google, and even now, I’m using ChatGPT to try to find audio material that is interesting and useful for my students. So, it was basically self-development.

Donzawl’s critical reflection on her past and autonomous initiatives for her professional development demonstrates her possession of a personal purpose for teaching and learning that could not be met with the status quo. She is not alone in enacting agency to gain pedagogical competencies for listening and speaking. Guura also reported having to:

Take time again to look for some documents and discuss them with colleagues working at the international level who are virtual English coaches. I also had some extra training in virtual English schools, one based in Moscow and the other in London. So, after these trainings, reading many books, and doing much research, I finally understood how to conduct these kinds of lessons.

Kobkou reported that EFL teachers in Burkina Faso generally lack the proper pedagogical skills to conduct listening and speaking courses. He reported that this is known to all and called all teachers to act for their professional development because:

If we, teachers, wait for the State or whoever to come and help us, I am not sure that it will happen. But if [we] have the opportunity to train [ourselves] professionally, this will help address some of the challenges like the scarcity of resources and whatever because, during training, many things are shared and can be used in order to improve our teaching capacities.

The general sense of the participants’ experience is that they had theoretical training in teaching listening and speaking but did not have the opportunities and resources to practice them. Aware of the lack of resources, teacher trainers would focus on what they can do with what they have, limiting the pedagogical options of teacher candidates and future teachers. Saanso shared memories of discussions with a teacher trainer about changes needed in the national English program and the resources needed for communicative English teaching and learning. He reported that the trainer asked them who would finance the innovative ideas they shared, and they all could not but laugh together and move on. The teacher training schools do not have strict expectations for teacher candidates and in-service teachers for teaching listening and speaking because they know that schools do not have resources for those courses. So. a decision to plan a specific lesson for them would be motivated by the teachers’ purpose and what they want for their students.

Challenging Contexts for the Teaching of Listening and Speaking

The challenges of EFL teaching and learning in the contexts of Burkina Faso appear complex, as it is difficult to situate them at one specific level in Peña‐Pincheira and De Costa’s (2021) ecological model, i.e., micro, meso, macro. For instance, participants reported that one of their biggest challenges is that students are only motivated by grades. However, their explanations showed that students’ motivations were linked to parental and school expectations and were conditioned by the national summative assessment practices. Saanso, for instance, observed that “When you [do] things that [students in 3e] don’t think that they may face on the exam, they don’t behave like it’s important for them.” He later explained this situation by the fact that:

Parents expect [students] to pass the BEPC exam, move forward, get through, and pass their Baccalaureate exam. That is what their parents expect from them. No parent expects his child to come and say, Mom or Dad, I can speak English correctly. There may be some, but that’s not the general opinion about the language. That is the problem. We put it in all the subjects to get good marks and progress. That’s the major problem that we should correct in English language teaching.

Saanso’s critical observation is also geared toward school expectations, mainly in the private sector. For him, private schools use the statistics of the national examination to prove the general opinion that they are schools of excellence and recruit students. For him, the economic benefit of good standing in those national exam statistics makes private schools pressure teachers to teach for grades. Saanso thinks that:

At the state level [in public schools], even if your students did not get good [grades] in your subject after the exam, there is no problem. But for example, in Ouagadougou, there are private schools where people send their children because they make 100% or something like that on the baccalaureate or 3e exams. If you go there and say that you will be focusing on bringing learners to speak instead of training them to be good to pass their BEPC exam, after the end of the year, they will not call you again to teach in their school.

This transversal challenge is deepened by other school and community-related challenges. At the school level, participants deplore the lack of resources to teach listening and speaking, overcrowded classrooms, and the lack of collaboration of school administrations for initiatives that are not curriculum-related, making thinking about listening and speaking an extra task. Guura reported that for his contractual time, he just focuses on “things that can engage [students]. Particularly grammar content and reading comprehension content. Because at the end of the day, they are also assessed on these.” He explained that schools never give them the books needed to teach. “They will recommend the books, but it’s up to the teacher to buy them.”

Kobkou found that the lack of resources is more severe in rural areas than in towns. He observed that none of his students in rural areas have official books in 3e compared to those in town. This challenged him to use his instruction time to “write everything on the board. Or even exercises, you need to write them on the board.” He reported having a projector that he can use in urban areas but deplored that:

I cannot screen something in the rural area because there is no electricity in the classroom. Yeah, there is no electricity. Otherwise, there are interesting videos that you can show the learners and that motivate them. I use them in town, but in a rural area, that is almost impossible.

Class size is one of the biggest challenges for the participants. Guura, for instance, reported advocacy efforts that led to him obtaining a projector for listening and speaking activities. However, he reported, “In 3e, it’s not possible [to teach listening and speaking] because the class size is large, and then we cannot use the projector there. There are numerous students, and even for the teacher to stand by them is complicated.” Bekounibè reported a similar situation that challenged the curriculum requirement for teaching to be learner-centered. He argued that:

Most classrooms are too large; the teaching is teacher-entered, not learner-centered. If you want to give them an opportunity to ask questions, you won’t be able to finish within the given time. So, this over-crowdedness and lack of materials and necessary equipment do not allow us to teach or do the task as we want. For a speaking activity, if you want the whole class to speak, if you want them to say something on a given topic, it means you have to go per row, and you will see that the 55 min will not be sufficient.

Parent and school responsibilities in the general teaching and learning processes are also presented as major challenges that affect not only English but the general schooling of their children. In rural areas, Kobkou regrets parents’ lack of collaboration with schools to assist their children. He thinks that in rural areas, “learners are abandoned by their parents,” and schools and teachers “sometimes do not have time because there are numerous students, and teachers cannot have time to take care of each of them individually.” Kobkou regrets feeling that:

When the parents send [children] to school, it is as if they freed themselves from the learners because they are disturbing them. So, they don’t care about how they perform, mainly in the rural areas. They do not care about their performance in the different subjects, and they do not, like sometimes, pass by the school to see how my daughter or my boy is performing, so the learners are abandoned to the school staff and the teachers.

At the school level, in addition to the lack of involvement in helping EFL teachers with resources for listening and speaking, participants reported that administrations sometimes make decisions that complicate teaching conditions. They sometimes recruit more than the class size can contain, making it impossible for teachers to innovate. Guura, for instance, observed that his school was built for a limited class size of 35 students. However, this academic year, they recruited 50 students in 3e, making it impossible for him to walk close to students when they are in the room. He observed that administrators “didn’t want at first to receive a lot of pupils, but I don’t know why they changed their mind this year and went beyond their usual sizes, and their rooms haven’t been built to welcome these kinds of sizes.” School and community conditions make it difficult to use student-centered approaches, create individual learning experiences in the classroom, and give individual support to all students. Teachers’ innovation and creativity become the main recourse for those experiences.

Helping Students Find their Purpose

As presented, the external factors influencing the teaching of listening and speaking require strong individual teacher attributes to navigate them and create opportunities for better teaching and learning. Some attributes are agentive practices they recall from their past learner experiences, good memories of past teachers, and their purposes and missions for teaching and learning. All those are sources of inspiration for participants in this study, and they rely on them to motivate themselves or their students. Donzawl, for instance, feels motivated to navigate the challenges when she thinks about “all the teachers who taught me.” She gained the strength to face difficulties by focusing on the influence that her teachers had on her and the accountability involved in it. Her greatest hope is that one day, her students “will say that I remember my English teacher. She was really passionate and committed, and she taught me a lot. I will be very proud to know that.”

Bekounibè also confessed that his daily motivator is the joy of knowing that he is not only sharing academic knowledge with his students “but also socializing them, giving them knowledge about our cultures, societies, and everything.” Saanso observed that the education system in Burkina Faso “is not motivating at all,” and they must find motivation from the impact they want to have on their students. As he explained, what motivates him to go to school “is the students. Yes, you have to go when you think about them, mainly those in exam classes expecting you to help them pass their exams or things like that.”

Motivated by the above purposes, participants enact agency at the classroom level by attempting to shift students’ view of schooling in general and English learning in particular. Agency practice is reported to consist of motivating and helping learners develop their purpose for learning. Saanso reported telling students at the beginning of the year that grades are important, and parents and schools expect them to perform well on the national exam, but grades should not be the main reason for school. He said:

At the beginning of the year, I used to tell my students that, yes, you have exams. I have to teach you in a way that will help you pass your exam. That’s what your parents may expect. But I also have to let you know that there is something beyond the exam that I want you to get: to be able to use English. Even if you don’t pass your exam or even if you leave school at this level, it’s important to speak English because the world is speaking English.

Connecting English learning at school to English needs in the real world allows participants to help learners think beyond the classroom. In the education system of Burkina Faso, one can repeat a year twice in the same school and the same cycle. From grade 7 to 10, a student who reseats twice must change schools, which requires extra registration fees. So, it is common to view students abandoning after many attempts at the 3e exam. Talking about the possibility of using English outside school seems to be an attention grabber, and Bekounibè reported giving his 3e students concrete examples of English use outside school. At the beginning of the school year, he tells his students that “English is an international language” and that apart from education, they will need English to “perform well in business, like being a trader, an artist, or everything you want to be involved in.” Donzawl motivates her vocational school students that though English is not assessed in their national exam, they should not neglect it because “no matter what [you] are studying, [you] will have to face English if [you] try to further [your] studies because English is unavoidable today.”

Participants demonstrated care for their students’ academic, social, and professional futures. This care creates personal dissatisfaction with how teaching and learning are conducted and leads to reflection on how to improve. Developing students’ purpose by motivating them for aspects of English not assessed at the national exam prepared the ground for extracurricular opportunities and innovative approaches within the classrooms.

Mobilizing Resources and Creating English Spaces

In addition to helping student define their purpose, teachers also enact their agency by mobilizing resources to create listening and speaking opportunities in the classroom. Participants like Donzawl, Bekounibè, and Saanso reported using their mobile phones, buying rechargeable Bluetooth speakers, and sometimes downloading audio materials online to teach listening activities. With those resources, Donzawl reported occasionally making her students “listen to some English material. It may be a dialogue, a song, a poem, or something they can be interested in.”

Participants reported having limited time and possibilities to frequently organize listening and speaking activities during official instruction time, given the amount of content to cover for the national exam. Guura, for instance, reported not bothering himself with listening and speaking activities during official instruction time. He preferred using that time “solely for reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary” while creating English clubs dedicated to listening and speaking activities. For him, the clubs he creates are:

An opportunity for them because they are somehow exposed to the language there. And there, there is constant use of the language, the target language. It also favors listening and speaking activities because we have sketches, games, and activating games. We have a lot of activities and programs where they are supposed to speak English and listen to their peers.

Kobkou found that English clubs are also alternatives to teaching listening and speaking and motivating students in rural areas where it is impossible to use audiovisual resources. Just like Gura, He also used his instruction time to focus on the implication of the curriculum while initiating dictation contests as opportunities “to test [students’] ability to listen and write” and creating an English club, mainly in rural areas for communicative learning of English. He reported that:

When I discovered that [students in] the rural areas were not motivated, I tried to organize English clubs in which I gathered all the pupils from different levels. And then, every Thursday, we have a weekly meeting during which we have some presentations from the learners and many, many interesting things like games and whatever that could make them speak.

English clubs are presented as spaces that influence the development of participants’ listening and speaking skills, such as Kobkou, Saanso, Bekounibè, and Guura. They reported being involved in those clubs from high school to university and considered them positive experiences that their students should have. However, creating those clubs is not always easy when administrations are not collaborating with English teachers. Bekounibè reported having a bad experience in his attempt to create a club in a private school and believes those experiences prevent teachers from venturing into it. He reported that

The first time I asked to create an English club in [Private school name removed], it wasn’t easy because the school headmaster told us to go through a [request]. After that, when the [request] was accepted, they gave us a classroom. We had full responsibilities to keep the class safe and not damage benches and everything in the classroom. So, it was when we accepted all those responsibilities that we were given the classroom. So, it was very difficult for us to find a room for such activities. But in public schools, it is very easy. Teachers are not engaged because, you know, it’s time-consuming; it is an extra effort for teachers to accompany pupils in English club activities.

Saanso also reported having the same challenges in his new school this year in a rural area. He said he noticed that students like listening to songs but do not like the academic activities that follow. So, creating a club could help them have fun while immersed in the language. That way, he could dedicate his classroom practice to preparing them for the exam. Unfortunately, the administration kept promising him resources that he still did not have.

Teachers who could create spaces for listening and speaking activities reported positive student responses. Donzawl noticed that students “really love listening lessons because they are less boring, it is different. It Kind of relaxes them. They like it.”  Bekounibè shared a similar experience, indicating that the chair lady of the first English club he created has also become an English teacher, and that motivates him to continue creating speaking and learning opportunities for students.

Some participants, like Guura and Kobkou, reported having administrative support to create opportunities for English practice outside the classroom. Those opportunities helped them focus classroom instruction on the curriculum contents and preparation of learners for the national examination. At the same time, the created situated spaces are used for activities that students like and could do in English. Other participants, like Saanso, Bekounibè, and Donzawl, found it difficult to create spaces in collaboration with the school administration because they had bigger challenges with the general school needs than the needs for speaking and listening. Donzawl, for instance, observed that for her electricity major 3e students, the administration found it more urgent to have electricity in the school for practical training than opportunities for students to speak English. Those teachers’ agentive practices were limited to what they could occasionally do within the classrooms.

Discussion

This paper explored how five EFL teachers agentively developed their listening and speaking skills and their pedagogical knowledge and enacted agency to create listening and speaking teaching opportunities for their 3e (grade 10) students in Burkina Faso. At the micro classroom level, the findings align with Han’s (2016), Haider and Chowdhury’s (2012), Rahman and Pandian’s (2018), and Some-Guiébré’s (2021) observations on teachers’ focus on some language domains (mainly grammar and reading comprehension) despite curricular call for communicative language teaching approaches. Their explanation that teachers justify those selective approaches by the need to prepare students for national exams is consistent with my findings on participants’ descriptions and interpretations of their classroom challenges and pedagogical choices. However, by specifically questioning micro classroom and meso school level actions taken to address their students’ listening and speaking skills needs, some participants reported creating extra-curricular opportunities like English clubs or English contests through which listening and speaking activities are covered. Such agentive initiatives cannot be unveiled when research positions teachers as policy implementers and evaluates them on official actions for the implementation of curricula.

Yung (2023), Nagy and Kovács (2022), Zongo and Somé-Guiébré (2021), Biseko et al. (2020), and Han (2016) had a greater focus on the EFL teachers as policy implementers and viewed both the teacher and the policy as potential sources of challenges to effective EFL teaching. Such troubleshooting approaches are good for diagnosing problems for effective teaching. In this case, recommendations are generally much more actionable by macro-level actors than meso- and micro-level actors. Using Bandura’s (in Cervone (Ed.), 2023) social cognitive theory, this paper positioned the teacher as meso and micro level actors with vertical and horizontal powers who can strategically identify problems and operationally decide if they should act alone or mobilize other stakeholders at the micro- and meso-level for solutions. Participants’ demonstration of how they mediate stakeholders’ interests and their professional commitment shows that teachers sometimes simultaneously play the role of policy implementers in the classroom and learners outside the classroom in centralized education contexts.

The findings also highlight that teachers’ pedagogical practices are not necessarily correlated with their beliefs, purposes, and competencies. Reflecting on the agency component of Peña‐Pincheira and De Costas’s (2021) ecological model, participants expressed dissatisfaction with how they were taught from middle to teacher training schools but felt obligated to use the same teaching techniques in their classrooms. Their critical examination of the challenges revealed that in centralized education systems, the classroom is a highly controlled space where innovative practices might lead to unmet expectations. From the findings, it can be argued that curricular expectations in such contexts are non-negotiable as they are nationally assessed, and the results have an impact on the appreciation of teachers, schools, and national education system performances. This somehow explains the constant observations on EFL teachers’ resistance to learner-centered communicative approaches (Biseko et al., 2020; Han, 2016; Somé-Guiébré, 2021).

Implication

The use of Peña‐Pincheira and De Costas’s (2021) ecological model as a methodological framework and Bandura’s (in Cervone (Ed.), 2023) social cognitive theory of agency helped understand that teachers’ agentive initiatives for the teaching of listening and speaking first requires the enactment of agency for the self. Participants stressed how important it is for EFL teachers to develop their listening and speaking skills, improve their pedagogical competencies, and develop interpersonal skills to motivate students and school administration for opportunities to teach those skills.

The finding also reveals that EFL teachers’ initiatives for listening and speaking in centralized contexts could get meso-level stakeholders’ and students’ buy-in when implemented outside the classroom. Bandura’s (Bandura in Cervone (Ed.), 2023) notions of imposed, selected, and created environments for agency took form in these findings. Participants viewed the classroom as an imposed environment where curricular, administrative, and community expectations restrict initiatives. Agency enactment for listening and speaking is very selective in this environment. Agency for non-assessed skills can then be negotiated in environments like school-wide or community initiatives. Hence, a practical implication for listening and speaking learning is to consider actions that do not interfere with classroom and official instruction time.

Participants’ comments on their learner, teacher candidate, and in-service teaching experiences imply that EFL teachers who had no extracurricular commitment to develop their listening and speaking skills or are not engaged in professional development for their pedagogical competencies might not have the agentive elements necessary to address micro-, meso-, and macro-level challenges. This calls for future research to consider exploring the experiences and agentive practices of two groups of teachers who had different learning and professional commitment trajectories. Research on teacher agency enactment could focus on the actions they take for or in created environments.

Limitations and Future Research

This research focused on the teachers and did not cover the perspectives of students, administrators, communities, and national actors. So, the findings are far from holistic, and the impact of the teachers’ agentive initiatives cannot be covered. Also, the number of participants is limited and does not allow a generalization of the findings. Finally, all the participants are engaged in the Burkina English Teachers Association (BETA), whose mission is “BETA today, better teachers tomorrow.” So, they are all aware of the importance of professional development, pedagogical innovation, and the need to look for resources to improve classroom experiences. They all are engaged in activities that reinforce their teacher agency. The findings might be different with participants who are not active in BETA.

Future research could explore collaborative agency enactment options and their potential impact at one specific level of Peña‐Pincheira and De Costas’s (2021) ecological model. I found that participants focused on individual actions at the micro- and meso-levels. Their collaborative actions at the meso-level targeted school administrations. Here, action research with capacity-building options for the engagement of stakeholders at the school and community level might help EFL teachers enrich their initiatives for English and mobilize resources that might help with classroom-level challenges.

Conclusion

In this research, I explored how five EFL teachers’ understanding of their cognitive needs for the teaching of listening and speaking, knowledge of their teaching contexts (classroom, school/community, or national contexts), proactive individual actions for teaching and learning, and engagement of other stakeholders help create opportunities for the teaching of listening and speaking in grade 10 classrooms. The findings revealed that participants felt cognitively challenged to conduct listening and speaking lessons as they felt unprepared and unequipped to conduct them. From their academic experiences, they revealed that listening and speaking courses were not instructional priorities from middle school to university. From their teacher-candidate experiences, they also felt unprepared to teach those lessons as the training focused on reading comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar teaching approaches. Those cognitive gaps were filled with reflective and autonomous agentive initiatives for the self through professional development.

For their professional experiences in 3e (grade 10 classrooms), participants felt challenged by national, community, school, and student expectations of better performance at the national examination (Peña‐Pincheira & De Costa, 2021). This transversal challenge, considered a priori for all school stakeholders, led participants to maximize using official instruction time to prepare students for the national English exam while creating English clubs, dictation contexts, and extracurricular opportunities for the communicative use of English. Their agentive practice consists of mediating interests to ensure the attainment of national expectations for learners’ performance in English and personal goals for learners’ proficiency.

The findings imply that in centralized systems like the case of Burkina Faso, teachers’ agentive initiatives for listening and speaking cannot go without friction at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels (Peña‐Pincheira & De Costa, 2021) and require collective actions at selected and mainly created environments for communicative English (Bandura in Cervone (Ed.), 2023; Bandura, 2001, Bandura, 2001). Students, school administrations, and parents will always have concerns about initiatives that are not curricular-focused or directly related to the national assessment format. Agency enactment for context-specific needs in centralized systems would call for initiative beyond the classroom. Such an approach helps mediate official expectations and professional commitment to empower learners.

About the Author

Kountiala J. Somé is a doctorate candidate in Teaching and Learning at Illinois State University. His research interest is to question equity and social justice issues related to school language policies. He is committed to contributing to efforts to connect school and families, home and school languages, and home and school literacy practices. He holds an M.A. degree in Second Language Acquisition, Policy, and Culture from the University of Southern Indiana (USA), completed a Master’s in Translation and Interpretation from Université Joseph Ki-ZERBO, and a Bachelor’s in American Literature and Civilization (Burkina Faso). He is an alumnus of cultural exchange programs like the Young African Leaders Initiatives (YALI) and the Fulbright Programs. ORCID ID: 0009-0003-3424-0432

To Cite this Article

Somé. K. J. (2025). Teachers’ agency and teaching challenges in multilingual spaces: An exploratory study of how EFL teachers address listening and speaking skills needs in centralized systems. Teaching English as a Second Language Electronic Journal (TESL-EJ), 28(4). https://doi.org/10.55593/ej.28112a7

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