Teacher agency and washback: insights from classrooms in rural Bangladesh

Abstract Although washback has been widely explored by applied linguists and education researchers, little attention has been paid to teacher agency in relation to it. It is critical to understand how language teachers navigate their pedagogy and respond to the broader curricular goals at a time when schools and teachers are being governed using examination and test data as accountability mechanisms. Drawing on data from classroom observations and interviews with two English teachers from a rural Bangladeshi school, this article illustrates how these teachers exercised their agency even under strong political pressure to improve students’ test data. The findings indicate that traditional understanding of washback as deterministic may be insufficient to account for the complex ways in which teachers may respond to broader educational goals in the context of washback. The study concludes with theoretical, empirical, and pedagogic implications for washback research and teacher education.