Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Educational settings are now characterised by ethnic, cultural, linguistic, sociocultural and epistemological diversity. This article analyses epistemological diversity as an important factor in shaping teacher education programmes. This involved exploring how teacher-educators and student-teachers align themselves or negotiate modern and postmodern views of education. The research employed a narrative analysis-based on a qualitative methodology to discuss the effects of modern and postmodern views of knowledge construction and pedagogical action during the English Teaching practicum at a state university in Bogota. The findings suggest that, even though teacher-educators and student-teachers position themselves with discourses of generational change regarding conceptions of knowledge construction, there is a tendency to shape practices based on the ideals of fixed-defined generations (e.g. old, young) who have fixed views of education (old/traditional, young/contemporary) which consequently give particular shapes to pedagogical actions.

Guidance in language use is an inherent aspect of language learning. Nonetheless, English linguistics has not paid attention to this dimension. Paradoxically, English learner’s dictionaries are characterized by offering evident guidance on language use. In the framework of a research project to compile a dictionary of Brazilian learners’ doubts about the Spanish language, we decided to investigate the English language lexicographic tradition, whose learner’s dictionaries lead substantial advances in foreign language teaching. This paper aimed to analyse how English learner’s dictionaries provide instruction on language use. The methodology consists of the application of a set of formal distinctions based on the opposition between description and prescription, and, subsequently, prescribing a certain language use or forbidding it. Our results show that the English language lexicography applies this whole array of guidance techniques on a particularly efficient and multidimensional way. We could conclude that the description-prescription dichotomy does not sustain itself in English learner’s lexicography. Ultimately, the act of looking for guidance about the English language in use reflects the learner’s inherent desire for instructions.

This paper explores models and research findings that have originated from the growing need for experimental analysis on hypertext and its educational potential. The research that have been reviewed in this work offer a common framework that, on the one hand, extends in an institutional context; and on the other hand, contains what digital is as a means of diffusing knowledge implying novel and underlying dynamics. The development of reading competence and learning through hypertexts is described as a relatively recent field, in which it is inescapable to seek utility and projection of results to promote student learning through efficient use of hypertext for didactics. This concept of didactics is relevant as it is understood as a complex way to categorize information and meanings.

Based on the objective of evidencing the teaching of English as a tool that allows providing a solution to the intercultural bilingual conflict by recognizing the individual and collective local identity of 20 students of a public school in Bogota in 2019, seven sessions are conducted with a case study methodology using a descriptive participatory approach and ethnographic tools which are analyzed under two theoretical categories. The results expose an intercultural bilingual conflict between English-local languages (Spanish-Tikuna), in which the teaching of English has the potential to provide a solution to environmental conflicts and foster other representations of the world. The analysis through the categories of biopolitics and daily life evidenced behavioral micro-revolutions that are born from the interaction of worldviews that generate an intercultural society that revalues the local over the global. It is concluded that, in the context of the research, the English class is an intercultural scenario by nature, which, with teachers who promote the acquisition of intercultural communicative competence, forges interdisciplinarity, generating glocalization through education and curriculum.

The acquisition of a language is a complex process and it is even more for students with ADHD, this work proposes the detection of methodological strategies to teach English as a foreign language (EFL) to a 14-year-old boy who has a disorder of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The analysis of the topic is important since there is very little literature that addresses it using a case study. The research is qualitative and heuristic, because it aims to discover an appropriate methodology for teaching English to a young person with ADHD. The English teacher and the psychologist of the educational institution were interviewed to obtain a deep understanding of the student’s context. Subsequently, various English teaching-learning methodologies were applied during 6 sessions. The observation sheets show that there are changes in the student’s behavior after the intervention, such as: less interruption in class, greater self-control and less sudden movements. The results allow us to conclude that the application of methodological strategies for teaching English that promote creativity and proactivity are beneficial for a student with ADHD.

Why teach English in Chile? Dominant public discourse claims for economic development, but with limited social mobility, do students from differing socio-economic groups perceive the same need? Recognising the influence of student belief systems on language acquisition, clashing language orientations could be creating unfavourable classroom environments. Thus, this study set out to identify the language orientations that secondary students recognise and hold in relation to the study of English with the purpose of helping English as foreign language (EFL) teachers become aware of the plurality of student perceptions. This was a qualitative multiple-case study which utilised a card-sorting technique paired with hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling (MDS) to identify the language orientations and their constructs and semi-structured interviews and classroom observations for verification. Whilst the language orientations students recognise and hold were found to be similar across socio-economic lines, an important issue is the divergence identified between the language orientations associated with the classroom and those that represent student interests, which could be explained due to the lack of intentional and conscious dialogue about the purpose of the classroom curriculum. Vision planning is proposed as a tool for teachers to address this breach between students and classroom curriculum.

Previous studies have reported lack of collocational competence and difficulties among English as a second language (ESL) learners. However, collocation is crucial in second language acquisition. This research examined the receptive and productive knowledge of collocations among the business students of COMSATS University Islamabad Vehari Campus who studied ESL. It also investigated the gap in the use of collocations at a receptive and productive level. The sample included 61 males and 39 females out of the total sample size of 100. Employing a quantitative approach, we gathered the data through a questionnaire and two collocations tests, and we analysed them via SPSS version 20. The overall result of the collocation test indicated that 66.4% of the respondents had the correct answer at the receptive level compared with only 33.7% at the productive level. Moreover, the statistical result presented a great gap in the ability to utilise collocations at the productive and receptive levels. This result also affirmed that despite their ability to understand the collocations, the students had difficulties in identifying proper English collocations confidently. Local and native language experiences might be one of the reasons that caught the students from being more confident in identifying the English collocations.

Validity and validation are common in large-scale language testing. These topics are fundamental because they help stakeholders in testing systems make accurate interpretations of individuals’ language ability and related ensuing decisions. However, there is limited information on validity and validation for classroom language testing, for which interpretations and decisions based on curriculum objectives are paramount, too. In this reflection article, I provide a critical account of these two issues as they are applied in large-scale testing. Next, I use this background to discuss and provide possible applications for classroom language education through a proposed approach for validating classroom language tests. The approach comprises the analyses of curriculum objectives, design of test specifications, analysis of test items, professional design of instruments, statistical calculations, cognitive validation and consequential analyses. I close the article with implications and recommendations for such endeavours and highlight why they are fundamental for high-quality language testing systems in classroom contexts.

This paper presents the main results achieved in the doctoral dissertation: “Hypertextuality and connectivity: alternatives of digital culture for the configuration of educative environments”. It focused on identify and describe the elements that characterize educational practices in educational environments in which connectivity, hypermediality and multimodality, along with the context of cyberculture, are promoted as central theoretical categories. The research corresponds to a micro-technographic study developed in IED, with a group of 30 students of 5th grade, in a specialized classroom equipped with tablets and full connectivity. The most important results and insights of the study are: 1) the emergence of the space of interaction as hypermedia itself; 2) a relationship between play and learning processes; 3) new dynamics of distributed attention; 4) symbolic distinction between the laboratory and the classroom; 5) to realize that pedagogical proposals are not as new as digital technologies; 6) due to its architecture, tablets do not help hypermedial writing; but multimodal writing and hybridization between digital and analogic technologies.

The Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal has been a space for encouraging language teacher researchers to share their experiences and illuminate others’ experience. In this trajectory, applied linguistics and English language teaching have been intertwined fields, where the integration of theoretical tools has allowed new comprehensions of one another. Authors of the journal have demonstrated this mutual exchange with the multiple outlooks and topics that they have proposed as part of their writings. As mentioned in the previous editorial (CALJ, Vol. 21, Nº 2, 2019), applied linguistics has been useful to determine not only a variety of practices of language teaching and learning, but also the implication of those in broader areas (Quintero & Bonilla, 2020, p. 2). In the same line of thought, the reflections that have emerged in the process of language teaching and learning have originated new inquiries in applied linguistics that have further contributed to both fields. In the commitment that the Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal has taken on, authors continue to explore areas that have a variety of characteristics.