Exploring teacher agency in online foreign language teaching (FLT) during and after the COVID-19 pandemic—a systematic review

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the global shift to online education at all levels, presenting dramatic changes and challenges. For foreign language teaching (FLT) in particular, the need to tackle difficulties and improve teaching requires a re-examination of teacher agency from an ecological perspective, especially the evolving and ever-changing roles undertaken by teachers at different stages of the teaching process. This study systematically reviews existing research on online FLT at the college level during the pandemic, aiming to develop a comprehensive model of teacher agency based on teachers’ roles and identities that proved effective during this period. After conducting a keyword search among Web of Science database in four categories (SSCI, SCI-Ex, A&HCI, and ESCI) and following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analysis Protocol (PRISMA-P 2020) and the clustering techniques of VOSviewer, we selected 39 peer-reviewed publications for this study. Our findings suggest that effective online FLT requires teachers to integrate multiple roles at different stages: before, during, and after online teaching. Specifically, six critical roles were identified, including technician, designer, motivator, communicator, assessor and facilitator, which as a whole contribute to the ecology of teacher agency. This review provides a model for understanding teacher agency during the pandemic, offering key insights for future research on online FLT.