The present study examines the tradeoff between the on-line construction of modifier-noun gender agreement and verb-subject person/number agreement vs. the automatization and entrenchment of agreement, through the study of bilingual speakers of Spanish and the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero, whose lexicon is highly cognate with Spanish,…

This article reports the results of a descriptive research project whose goal was to identify the degree of satisfaction of students enrolled in two teacher education programs at a public Colombian university. As satisfaction and quality are prevalent terms in curriculum evaluation, and are encouraged by accreditation and government regulations,…

This article reports the results of a study whose goal was to determine the views of undergraduate students regarding the English as a foreign language courses they must take as a requirement for graduation at a public university in Colombia. One hundred and thirty students from 10 undergraduate programs were surveyed and their responses were…

This study explores the use of language learning apps as a didactic tool for vocabulary building in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. It was developed through a mixed-methods approach, with a concurrent design in order to collect, analyze and validate qualitative and quantitative data. Although there was controversy on the use of…

Even though the majority of Colombian professors are also involved in research, they have limitations in their English language skills that separate them from the rest of the scientific society. Evidently, these limitations have become an obstacle in the awareness of professors' modest, but no less important, research work. In order to carry out…

This article reports the results of a study inquiring about the role of education-related factors in the development of cultural intelligence. Five hundred fifty-seven students of a Colombian international business (IB) undergraduate program participated in the study. The psychometric properties of the measures were assessed by conducting…

This paper presents the results of an Action-Research cycle conducted at Universidad del Valle, which aimed at fostering learner autonomy in freshmen from a foreign languages program, within an English course. The study established the freshmen's entrance profile regarding learner autonomy, and implemented a course based on the development of…

In the field of applied linguistics, for the past fifteen years, there have been discussions about language assessment literacy (LAL)--the knowledge, skills, and principles related to assessing language ability--(Davies, 2008; Fulcher, 2012). However, the field lacks research on the professional development of language teachers, particularly…

This study sets out to investigate professors' needs from an English as a foreign language program in a public university regarding demands, interests, and lacks based on the methodology of needs analysis. Data collected through a survey, focus groups, and individual interviews showed that professors need to meet the institutional language policy…

This article examines how four second language (L2) teachers' discursive practices changed as they attempted to implement dynamic assessment (DA) in their classrooms. Classroom artifacts, lesson recordings, and reflections from two pre-service teachers and two in-service teachers, both before and after a professional development series on DA, were…

Program evaluation is a process of carefully collecting information in order to make informed decisions to strengthen specific components of a given program. The type of evaluation an institution decides to undertake depends on the purpose as well as on the information the institution wants to find out about its program. Self-evaluation represents…

This article reports an action-research project aimed at designing, applying, and assessing a didactic sequence for teaching English as a foreign language in the first grade of a public school in Cali. The article comprises the context, reasons that justified the research, theoretical support, methodology, and results, analyzed through descriptive…

Frustrations with traditional testing led a group of teachers at the English for adults program at Universidad EAFIT (Colombia) to design tests aligned with the institutional teaching philosophy and classroom practices. This article reports on a study of an item-by-item evaluation of a series of English exams for validity and reliability in an…

This research is a report on a quantitative study carried out at the English Departments of three public universities in the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Its main purpose was to analyze the strategies English departments coordinators use to enhance the quality of education their institutions provide in terms of bilingualism. The participants were…

This paper reports an action-research study on language learning strategies in tertiary education at a Colombian university. The study aimed at improving the English language performance and language learning strategies use of 33 first-year pre-service language teachers by combining elements from two models: the cognitive academic language…