This article reports an English language needs analysis of Colombian Social Science master's students. Information from faculty interviews, course syllabi, and student surveys shows that students need English to access and update their disciplinary knowledge through research articles and book chapters to successfully participate in class…

Cross-border migration is increasing in a globalized world. On the physical borderlands, migration across and between borders occurs on a habitual basis. This qualitative study employs semi-structured interviews to explore how three "transfronterizo" teachers along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands draw on their backgrounds and lived…

This article presents a study which explores perceptions of Chilean future teachers of English as a foreign language regarding the usage of Spanish as L1 in English lessons. The participants belong to first- and fourth-year levels of their programs at four universities located throughout Chile. The data collection tool was Mohebbi and Alavi's…

Studies of second language learning have revealed a connection between first language transfer and errors in second language production. This paper describes an action research study carried out among Chilean university students studying English as part of their degree programmes. The study focuses on common lexical errors made by Chilean…

English teachers' professional development responds to individual needs and societal discourses about teaching, learning, and language use. This paper reports the findings of a case study that explored the factors that increased or limited the active and committed participation of nine Colombian teachers of English in professional development…

The present study sought to assess and characterise the amount of first language use that two English as a foreign language teachers used to accomplish a number of functions in two classroom modes. An adapted version of the Functional Language Alternation Analysis of Teacher Talk scheme was used to analyse teacher talk in six English as a foreign…

This multiple case study explored the influence of English teachers' methodological practices over undergraduate students' learning processes in two English as a foreign language mandatory courses for different majors, at Universidad de Pamplona (Colombia). Data were gathered through non-participant observations, field notes, stimulated recall…

The international trend towards a practice-based approach in teacher education has permeated foreign language teacher education and English language teaching. A practice-based approach is based on the understanding that teachers learn to teach a language by engaging in "actual" teaching rather than "talking" about teaching. We…

This article provides an overview of the ideas that two groups of bilingual teachers from different contexts, one indigenous and the other Western, have about the concepts of education, bilingualism, and interculturality. Their opinions were gathered through focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and videos, and reviewed under light of what the…

Stemming from a study of what it is like to teach English in rural Colombia considering both English language teaching policy and social challenges of these contexts, this paper explores different locally grounded English language teaching practices. Through the analysis of teachers' narratives and field observations, four examples of such…

We present findings of a project that investigated the potential of an online tandem program to enhance the foreign language learning of two groups of school-aged beginner learners, one learning English in Colombia and the other learning Spanish in New Zealand. We assessed the impact of the project on students' learning with a free writing…

We report on an exploratory study comparing the performance as online tutors of two groups of beginner eleven-year-old students of English in Colombia and Spanish in New Zealand. The native speaker students of the foreign language the others were learning corrected paragraphs written by their peers. The feedback provided by each group of tutors…

Spanish-speaking students constantly complain about the difficulty they have comprehending spoken English. It seems teachers do not often provide them with strategies to alleviate that. This article reports on a pedagogical experience carried out at a Colombian university to help pre-service teachers at an intermediate level of English to improve…

Despite some school efforts to offer students the best second language learning, English language lessons are often taught with an overuse of the mother tongue. Hence, an action research project was conducted in order to discover how to adapt some features of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) component: Lesson delivery, for the…

This article reports the results of an action-research project that examines enhancing students' English learning processes through the selective use of their mother tongues with the aim of overcoming their reluctant attitudes toward learning English in the classroom. This study involves forty ninth-graders from an all-girls public school in…