In an effort to become more competitive in the global market, Colombia, as many other Latin American countries, has declared English the dominant foreign language to be taught in schools and universities across the country. To support this measure, in the last 16 years, the government, through its National Ministry of Education, has launched a series of programs such as National Program of Bilingualism 2004-2019; the Program for Strengthening the Development of Competences in Foreign Languages; The National English Program: Colombia Very Well 2015-2025; and most recently, Bilingual Colombia 2014-2018. Results from studies conducted by local researchers across the country suggest that the regulation has posed a series of challenges for public primary school teachers, which these programs have not been able to address. These challenges can be divided into two categories: professional and work related. The purpose of this article is twofold: First, the article intends to provide a critical overview of the four programs that the Colombian government has launched since 2004. Second, the article aims to present some conclusions and recommendations for language policy design and implementation in Colombia.
This article reports partial results of a qualitative study which explored the gains and challenges encountered by two groups of English as a foreign language pre-service teachers from a public university in Medellin, Colombia, in developing a situated view of academic writing through a systemic functional genre-based instructional unit. The unit was part of a written communications course and used an approach called the teaching-learning cycle. Results from the study suggest that one of the main gains was related to pre-service teachers' emerging understanding of context, purpose, and audience. One of the main challenges concerned pre-service teachers' difficulty with shifting their former views of grammar as a fixed system of rules.
Traditionally, at universities, English as a foreign language instructors have used a series of approaches to teach students how to write academic texts in English from both teacher preparation and regular programs. In spite of this, students continue to have problems writing the academic texts required of them in the different courses. Concerned with this issue, a group of English as a Foreign Language writing instructors from a Teacher Education Program in Medellín engaged in the study of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The purpose of this article is to report the insights that one of these instructors gained once he began using these theories to analyze a narrative text produced by one of the students in his class.
Cosmetic surgery has become a widespread phenomenon in the last decades, especially in Colombia where a large number of women undergo it every year. This surgical boom is reflected in several Linguistic Landscape resources including the internet, where a growing number of cosmetic surgery centers advertise their procedures. Particularly common among these procedures is breast augmentation, which many Colombian women have at a young age. This article reports on a study which drew on critical linguistic landscape and feminist theories to explore how local cosmetic surgery websites contribute to the commodification of women’s breasts, and its implications for users of these websites. Data collected for this study included text and images from 12 local websites advertising cosmetic surgery in Colombia, including breast augmentation. Data analysis showed that these websites contributed to the commodification of women’s bodies by using a series of ideological mechanisms. Implications for users of these public spaces include asking critical questions about these websites and becoming more socially active in their consumption.
this research report presents the results of an exploratory study conducted in the Department of Antioquia about the views that National Bilingual Program stakeholders' had of the program itself and of the way it was being implemented in this region. Results from this study suggest that even though stakeholders did not have much information about the program, they did have a lot to say about the actions that the government had taken up to that moment in their localities and of the changes that were required for the program to effectively achieve its objectives.
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