Exploring EFL students' experiences of learner agency in English writing supported by AI-mediated metacognitive scaffolding

Learner agency in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing has become an important issue due to the increasing presence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools as mediators in the writing process. Even though previous studies have looked into the use of AI-mediated scaffolding in self-regulated learning and in improving writing performances, there is little research done on how learner agency is enacted, experienced, and negotiated by EFL students in AI-supported writing where the AI foregrounds metacognitive scaffolding through dialogic questioning instead of generating ready-made textual content. This qualitative case study aims to address this knowledge gap by investigating the experiences of ten EFL students from the fourth semester enrolled in a public university in Indonesia who engaged in SICA, an AI-mediated metacognitive scaffolding tool in the form of a Line-based chatbot, in their Factual and Critical Writing course. Thematic analysis was applied to data gathered from written reflections from all ten participants and semi-structured interviews with nine of them, following the temporal dimensions of agency proposed by Emirbayer and Mische (1998). It has been found that Socratic questions promoted the activation of students' metacognitive cycle of planning, monitoring, and evaluation. Students have negotiated AI suggestions either by accepting, modifying or rejecting them depending on relevance, authenticity, and usefulness, and therefore demonstrating learner agency through informed decision-making. While technical and cognitive tensions have appeared, they have acted as productive friction which prompted learners to reconceptualize their writer identity with greater metacognitive awareness and confidence.