This paper aims to understand the relationship between context and agency in the context of a South Korean high school teacher's English classroom pedagogy. This was explored through two semi-structured interviews with the teacher, which was transcribed and analyzed using the principles of grounded theory in order to obtain a bottom-up, empirically grounded understanding of the relationship. This approach identified a strong contextual influence in the form of Korea's national university entrance examination, which is a constraint on both the teacher and students, resulting in a high focus on receptive skills, and thus shaping both agents' own respective choices in English language teaching and learning with the end-goal of students' success on the exam. 'Passive agency' emerged as a theory to describe this insight. The paper concludes with a discussion about the implications of 'passive agency' for the possible future trajectories of students.