Drawing upon Bourdieu's concept of capital, this article examines the enactment of the "Programa Nacional de Bilingüismo" (National Bilingual Program), a policy that aims to provide Colombian students equal opportunities to learn English. In this exploratory, sequential mixed-methods study, data were collected from teachers and students…

This article provides a comprehensive qualitative synthesis of EFL writing studies published in Colombian journals between 1990 and 2020. We synthesised 63 research reports regarding authorship, publication year, focus, methodology (context, participants, research paradigm, design, and data collection methods and analyses), validity, reliability,…

This article reports the findings of a qualitative interpretive research study that explored the social representations children have about the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language in elementary schools in Medellín, Colombia. Sixty children in first, third, and fifth grades of public and private schools participated in the study.…

This phenomenological study explores students' perceptions about the relationship between foreign language learning and culture when using telecollaboration. Three main concerns underlie this work: the lack of studies that explore how students perceive the relationship between foreign language learning and culture in the local context, the need to…

This article presents the foundations to design a curriculum that integrates music and drama as strategies for the teaching of English as a foreign language. Besides promoting interdisciplinarity, this curriculum seeks to improve the language level of those children attending continuing educational programs at any higher education institution. The…

This article focuses on research carried out in a private school in Bogotá with a group of English as a foreign language fourth-graders. The study aimed to analyze interaction in the English classroom through action research, based on tasks that promoted collaborative work and involvement of the students and their teacher. The instruments to…

The main objective of this study was to identify 6th to 11th grade students' beliefs about their English class in a public institution in Armenia, Colombia. By means of interviews, drawings, and focus groups with 30 students, four beliefs were established. It was found that students' beliefs are attached to the experiences they have lived in their…

We report on an action research project aimed at developing oral communication in first-graders, using songs as a strategy for young learners to use and enjoy English. It was developed at a Colombian public school over three months. The teacher-researchers attempted to encourage students using simple and amusing songs to help them learn new…

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…

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…

The aim of this article is to inform on research intended to find out how pronunciation instruction of English as a foreign language was handled in the language classroom with elementary students and also understand if pronunciation instruction had an impact on students' confidence when using it. In order to do this, a qualitative case study was…

In this article we report the findings of a two-phase action research study focused on the role of collaborative work in the development of elementary students' writing skills at a Colombian school. This was decided after having identified the students' difficulties in the English classes related to word transfer, literal translation, weak…

In this article we describe and analyze how autonomous learning emerges in third graders' socioaffective practices as reconstructed in written narratives. Results were obtained by analyzing and reflecting on classroom observation, interviews and written narratives done by the students which let us appreciate different behaviors and reactions the…

This study focused on investigating whether the teachers' geographical distribution influences their attitudes towards their students' use of code switching. The study was guided by the following research question: Are there differences between teachers' opinions of the north elementary schools and teachers' opinions of the south elementary…

This article presents the results of a study on utilizing stories for teaching English as a foreign language to children in first, second and third grades. It was carried out in a Colombian public elementary school in Bucaramanga, Colombia. The proposal was initiated by a group of student-teachers at Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, Seccional…