Confucian Heritage Culture Students and transformative agency in EAP education : Co-designing a reading curriculum in a Change Laboratory research-intervention

Reid, James and Bligh, Brett (2026) Confucian Heritage Culture Students and transformative agency in EAP education : Co-designing a reading curriculum in a Change Laboratory research-intervention. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Research on English-medium instruction (EMI) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) often portrays Confucian-Heritage Culture (CHC) learners’ silence or caution as evidence of limited agency, focusing mainly on how students adapt to teacher-designed pedagogy. Far less attention has been paid to how CHC learners act when they are invited to reshape that pedagogy themselves. This study addresses that shortcoming by examining how two CHC-majority cohorts developed transformative agency when positioned not as recipients of a curriculum, but as its co-designers. Two Change Laboratory research-interventions—one face-to-face and one online— were embedded within a 15-week EAP reading course at a Japanese university, involving consecutive cohorts of Japanese CHC students in 2019 and 2020. Within this setting, students analysed tensions in the inherited curriculum, experimented with alternative tools and routines, and trialled their ideas through classroom enactment and focus groups. Video data, student-created artefacts, journal entries, and researcher notes were analysed using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, particularly systemic contradictions and discursive manifestations of transformative agency, to trace how critique, imagination, commitment, and action emerged across both cohorts. The findings show that, as students identified and addressed contradictions in the course activity, they demonstrated far more transformative agency than is commonly assumed for CHC learners. In the first intervention, students introduced new seminar structures, annotation routines, peer-feedback tools, and authentic-reading practices, and—in the focus group—proposed shifting to an unseen-text examination to assess genuine comprehension rather than memorisation. Participants in the second intervention then implemented and expanded these ideas: they developed Student-Led Workshops to replace the original Transmedia Presentations, co-created clearer rubrics, trialled new workshop and seminar routines, and participated in the first unseen-text exam. Across the work of the two cohorts, transformative agency shifted from questioning and modelling toward taking action and consolidation, with students independently refining tools, negotiating fairness in assessment, and stabilising shared preparation norms. This developmental movement aligns with the broader pedagogical trajectory traced in the thesis—from transmission-focused study to dialogic co-construction and finally to multimodal autonomy. The study contributes to understandings of CHC learner agency by conceptualising it as developing collectively and cumulatively within a purposeful pedagogical structure. It shows how agency can snowball across cohorts and how helping students expose and address contradictions in their tools and norms can stimulate meaningful redesign. It also reveals a cultural dynamic in the co-design process: although the tools students created enabled recognisably Socratic behaviours—questioning, critiquing, debating— the refinements they made reflected Confucian preferences for clarity, explicit criteria, and fair procedures, shaped partly by GPA pressures. Finally, the study demonstrates that students themselves drove a shift toward authentic, content-rich materials aligned with Soft-CLIL principles—an approach that, unlike typical top-down CLIL implementations, emerged from student demand rather than institutional mandate. Together, these contributions illustrate how structured, collaborative design processes can support sustainable, student-led curriculum innovation in EAP contexts.