Abstract A critical perspectives approach to teaching and learning English as a foreign language is a relatively recent practice in the global South, and even though there are reports that explain how this approach is enacted in the curriculum, few studies have been conducted on how teacher educators and pre-service teachers deal with its implementation in their everyday practices. Hence, a descriptive qualitative study was conducted at a public university to delve into the perceptions of teachers and pre-service teachers regarding this approach and the challenges that it entails. The participants were nine in-service teachers and 31 pre-service teachers teaching and learning English following a curriculum based on critical and intercultural perspectives. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and a survey. The thematic analysis of the data yielded results that suggest a nuanced perception of participants, especially the pre-service teachers, and highlight the challenges that both groups of participants undertake when teaching and learning English through critical perspectives. These findings suggest an important issue to the EFL field, which is the need for going beyond language as a system when teaching and learning it, while ensuring in-service teachers’ professional development and the adequate balance between linguistic aspects of the language and the promotion of critical awareness.
This article presents a perspective on how Instagram was used as a pedagogical tool to enhance a group of Chilean students' engagement in EFL writing. This qualitative study involved eight third-year students from a higher education institution in Chile. The data tools included pre-and post-intervention tests, an analytic rubric, two Likert scale surveys, and a focus group. The results showed a significant difference between the participants' pre-and post-intervention test scores. Additionally, the findings highlighted the positive impact of Instagram on the different writing engagement dimensions assessed: affective, behavioral, cognitive, and social dimensions. As a conclusion, teachers may consider incorporating Instagram as an effective pedagogical tool into their teaching strategies to create more enjoyable and relevant tasks and to enhance the students' level of writing engagement in more contextualized communicative situations, which can be significant for them.
Public bilingual education in Quind & iacute;o is often lauded as exemplary in Colombia. However, a critical examination of the criteria underlying such commendations reveals acomplexlinguistic,political, discursive, and ideological landscape in which the terms "bilingual education" and "bilingualism" warrant discussion, given the sociocultural context in the country and the evolution of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and language teaching. This article proposes a Critical Discourse Analysis of various trends in bilingual education in Quind & iacute;o, with a particular focus on how bilingualism has been understood within the department's educational policies. Using documentary analysis (Bowen, 2009), we analyze and discuss the different conceptions of bilingualism and bilingual education contained in public educational documents such as departmental and municipal bilingualism projects, Institutional Educational Projects, curricula, and area plans of some traditional public schools in the department during the last two decades. The study demonstrates how deeply ingrained language ideologies influence the discourses found in local official educational documents and the foreign language teaching practices in public schools. Nonetheless, the analysis of recent documents also shows a different view of multilingualism, understood from more plural perspectives that include other languages present in the local educational landscape, such as French and Colombian Sign Language, among others, often neglected by monoglossic ideologies that tend to privilege exclusively English teaching and learning in Quind & iacute;o's public schools. This article aims to advance the current understanding of bilingualism and language education in the region.
This systematic review investigates the potential of Natural Language Processing (NLP) based Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to enhance literacy development in higher education. We reviewed (n=63) documents published between 2015 and 2023, exploring how NLP has been used in language education within processes of literacy, biliteracy instruction, and language assessment. The literature reveals exploratory integrations and empirical evidence of the impact of these technologies in language instruction, learning, and assessment which sheds light on NLP software tools used and key application areas. Our findings reveal exploratory integrations and initial evidence for the impact of NLP-based AI on language education, language instruction, assessment and feedback, existing challenges and future directions, as well as ethical considerations that reveal the ongoing debates and efforts to leverage AI powered technologies to current curricular approaches in higher education.
