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

All research has as its starting point the panorama on the trajectory of the field of study in which it is registered. It is what is identified in the academic tradition with the name of antecedents. The background indicates where they are the advances of the investigation. So it makes it possible to see from there what is missing, or what is a priority to investigate or innovate in, and it justifies the relevance of the new project. But the antecedents are always broad in such general areas as education and pedagogy and even in regard to specific problems related to the pedagogies of language and literature. Hence the importance of the delimitation of the topic, when it is a seminar, a conference or presentation through which researchers seek to synthesize the progress and characteristics of the experiences accumulated in a given route. For this work we will delimit two routes: 1) The Innovation and Research Prize route that the IDEP and the SED call in Bogotá every year. and 2) The route of the Colombian Network for the Transformation of Teacher Training in Language. The aim is to characterize the prevailing pedagogical modalities in the assumption of the literary text in the classrooms according to the papers presented to the XVI National Network Workshop in 2018 and the articles by the teachers of Bogotá to participate in the prize, in the 2011 section to 2014. This panorama, or state of art, will allow us to approach the concept or approaches to literature in the discourses of teachers and the ways in which they proceed in the pedagogical work with the literary text in the different grades of schooling (pre school, primary, secondary and middle school). The balance has to lead to the outline of possible pedagogical strategies to strengthen the astonishment implied in the reconstruction of the senses constellated in the literary text, that is, the work with the interpretation and its interdisciplinary imbrications.

How we organise the world’s knowledge into a hierarchy and express it through language influences the quality of the reading and writing process. Nonetheless, identifying and using the categories are processes that are unnoticed and not paid attention to while reading and writing, which affects cognitive instrumentalisation. Understanding cultural categories as the notions of a system, a factor, a classification or of a function, for example, does not always occur by itself. Thus, the theoretical and methodological foundations of the proposed categories have considered identifying the cultural imaginary, the categorical thinking and the delimitation of cognitive functions at the input, development and output levels, proposed by Feuerstein (1993) as a method for cognitive instrumentalisation that becomes evident in reading and writing. Heuristics of reality and language as a methodology has facilitated the precision and study of cultural categories. The usefulness of the cognitive tools as concept maps and mentifacts is already known. However, cultural categories are also clearly an aid in the cognitive instrumentalisation of reading and writing, which are essential for research and professional training. The results are evident in cultural categories’ inventory and classification and how they favour the instrumentalisation of the cognitive functions present in reading and writing. In addition, cultural categories make language and culture instrumentalisation viable.

This paper presents the results of an oral discourse analysis of a group of students from the Universidad del Valle in general students assemblies, in the context of the Hospital Universitario del Valle crisis in 2015. Its purpose is to describe and analyze the characteristics of a type of oral discourse little studied in Colombia that, apart from the official academic discourse, demonstrates a type of students practice framed in the critical literacy. The study was based on the data interpretation model of Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, which, due to their multidisciplinary nature, allowed the integration of argumentation theory notions and speech acts theory categories as well as analyze discourse as an instrument of resistance. As a result, the study evidenced the emergence of a type of oral text that reflects the identities and ideologies of the speakers, in this case students who based on the practice of a critical literacy construct statements of argumentative content. These statements beyond communicating ideas reveal intentions for the performance of acts, and demonstrate through their topics the character of resistance of the student discourse. Likewise, the study allowed to recognize the organizational dynamics of the student assembly, characterizing its components and participants roles.

This article describes the thoughts and perceptions regarding a potential problem when teaching and learning writing skills in school and university environments: assessments of writing using computerised instruments. The conflict between this assessment and the one carried out by humans may be subject to discussion and analysis, as it has been in the United States, where several experiments have attempted to automate written compositions. However, the results have been unsatisfactory according to both the researchers and the students whose written output had been subjected to such assessment. Therefore, the present article aims to enquire into the perceptions of university students with respect to their willingness to receive feedback and evaluations on their written compositions through an automated instrument. To gather this information, students were asked to respond online as to whether they would be willing to subject their work to evaluation by a computer, including the option to add comments. Responses and comments were classified as positive, negative and undecided. Most of them responded negatively, followed by positive and undecided votes. It can be concluded that there is a need for further in-depth studies exploring the perception of both students and professors to obtain more consistent results. In addition, institutions that opt to use automated instruments to assess written assignments should explain its advantages and disadvantages.

This article is the result of a pedagogical procedure present at the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente in Cali, with first semester students of Engineering and Administrative Sciences attending the Written and Spoken Discourse course, provided by the Language Department in the first semester of 2018. This work considers and describes the impact of a didactic sequence that focuses on teaching argumentation from the perspective of the model developed by Toulmin, Morrás and Pineda (2007), designed on the basis of the pedagogical approach proposed by Biggs (2005), the primary theoretical mentor of the university’s Institutional Educational Project. The methodology used was the systematisation of experiences, a proposal that dates back to 1970, while the analysed categories were problematisation, behaviour and self-regulation in the teaching and learning process. This experience shows the importance of proposing active teaching methods in class, facilitating the development of argumentation as a strategy for reasoning and learning. We concluded that the design of experiences from these concepts may foster deep learning based on the construction of reflective practices, both by students and teachers.

The current study aims at examining academic text construction practices of college students from the analysis of digital resources and tools they use when writing academic texts. To set a preliminary diagnosis, some results of a pilot questionnaire administered at Universidad de Lleida (Spain) and Universidad del Valle (Colombia) are presented. This study is qualitative with a descriptive approach. In this context, some answers related to the technological profile and the use of Web 2.0 tools in academic writing are analyzed. The preliminary analysis of the data shows that it is essential to include the development of academic digital competences, both from a technical, critical and didactic point of view, in the teacher education programs. In short, it provides an overview of how new generations approach written language.

In this article, we compare the formative purposes available for teaching oral argumentation on the basis of the Colombian curriculum for language subject area. In order to weigh the relevance of the so-called Derechos Básicos de Aprendizaje (MEN, 2017), the study comparatively reviews three curricular documents from the language subject area (MEN, 1998, 2006, 2017). This research, methodologically anchored to the qualitative-interpretative paradigm, is directed to the middle education cycle from a scheme guided by Content Analysis (Krippendorff, 1990), a scheme through which we discriminate between training objectives: to learn -about -; and to learn -through- oral argumentation. Findings include: 1) lack of definition in the orality, text, and argumentation categories; and 2) disconnection between the curricular documents; and between the objectives and their associated argumentation models. 

This abstract aims to assess the role of argumentation in three documents that are a part of the regulatory public policy on the implementation of the Chair for Peace in Colombian educational institutions. This evaluation is based on philosophical approaches to peace and modern rhetorical argumentation, using the Grounded Theory methodology. The study shows that a regulatory approach to argumentation is preferred, which instrumentalises this topic as an element for conflict resolution. Finally, we concluded that teaching argumentation from a rhetorical perspective is essential in providing tools for the linguistic strengthening of conflicts and the assessment of differences in current multicultural democracies.

In this article, the beliefs of students pursuing a degree in primary education teaching at a medium-sized public Spanish university (approximately 20,000 students) are analysed in relation to the concept of ‘grammar’ in language teaching. This work is constructed on the basis of students’ pre-university experiences in comparison to the students’ current language training on the subject ‘Didactics on foreign language in primary school: English’. The research methodology involves a mixed approach because it combines qualitative and quantitative data, specifically. First, we utilised a survey (Cook and Singleton, 2014) that aimed at gathering students’ opinions on the role of grammar in language teaching. Second, we organised a focus group to clarify specific opinions which are poorly understood with only quantitative information. Furthermore, we present fundamental principles on current language training on the basis of the cognitive mechanisms of the unconscious assimilation of English according to foreign language acquisition teaching (Haidl, 1993, 1995), which avoids teaching grammatical rules and guidelines explicitly. The results exhibitsimilar opinions among respondents, especially in questions related to training that only considers the formal study of target language grammar. Moreover, the results also show that thoughts from respondents are formulated on the basis of a single manner of understanding languages that also coincides with what has been experimented in person at the pre-university stages: formal instruction. Nonetheless, from the action research, it appears that respondents satisfactorily embrace the opportunities provided through ‘acquisition learning’.

Methodology, as a category, is a determining aspect in establishing the quality of research and assessing whether the knowledge production process is adjusted to epistemological and methodological models that are valid for a specific scientific and discursive community. With respect to the aforementioned, the results of an examination of the rhetorical structure and characteristics of the ‘Methodology’ section in 50 postgraduate theses in education are presented in this article, considering the concept of rhetorical moves suggested by Swales (1990, 2004). We conducted a statistical–descriptive analysis (quantitative approach) and a document review of the theses, which involved classifying, ordering and categorising the main moves that were identified (qualitative approach). As a result, we found four frequent rhetorical moves: 1) type of research; 2) context, population and sample; 3) data collection procedure and 4) information analysis procedure. Additionally, two optional moves were found: one was related to scientific validation and rigour criteria, and the second one was that of ethical considerations. We concluded that knowing thediscursive and rhetorical characteristics of this section is relevant for teaching writing to thesis students because reconstructing the methodological path majorly ensures the reliability and validity of the process of constructing scientific knowledge.