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Editorial

This article provides an overview of how student-teachers and the pedagogical practicum are conceived in the Colombian English language teaching field. The study reviewed 72 articles in three levels of analysis: extraction of corresponding knowledge, epistemic review, and concatenation of emergent insights. The analysis reveals that student-teachers are conceived as subjects with principles, values, beliefs, responsibilities, and knowledge. Meanwhile, the pedagogical practicum is an academic space, process, and experience constituted by purposes, practical knowledge, and building relationships. This literature review mainly contributes to the field as an invitation to continue revising the foundations of the pedagogical practicum and the kind of student-teachers that this space may develop.

Editorial

The research study shows how pedagogical practicum is conceived, and how student-teachers are constructed as language teachers, within the discourses spoken in the initial meetings and institutional documents of pedagogical practicum in an English language teaching undergraduate program in Bogota, Colombia. The discourses were analyzed under the principles of ethnography of communication and linguistic ethnography. This study affords insights into a contributory conception of pedagogical practicum and into an institutional image and a teacher’s figure of student-teachers. Pedagogical practicum contains several academic, professional, and experiential aspects that configure this space with established (pre-) requisites, tasks, and roles for student-teachers; these aspects in turn start constructing these individuals with particular manners of must-be and must-do.

This editorial article reflects on the paradigmatic changes that the Colombian ELT community has recently experienced due to the developments of local scholarship in varied topics. This editorial article makes the changes evident by introducing the papers for this special issue of HOW journal on its 30th anniversary. These include topics as interculturality, literacy, English language pre-service teacher construction and professional development, critical views about bilingual education policy, and the interrelation between gender and ELT. The local scholarship development in these topics displays a rupture with the ELT canon. By so doing, the Colombian ELT scholarship shows a potency that wields foundations for the ELT field in the country.

Editorial

This article discusses English language pre-service teachers’ pedagogical practicum experiences. We compiled, from their teacher journals and group talks, the lived teaching experiences of a group of 34 pre-service teachers who were majoring in English language education at a private university in Bogota, Colombia. The analysis of their stories makes us realize that their first practicum experiences are full of feelings and emotions, and that their first teaching practices are based on their mentor teachers’ pieces of advice. These first experiences, in turn, develop the foundation upon which they build themselves as English language teachers.

Autonomy has been of interest to scholars in the Colombian field of English language education over the last two decades. A constant work on understanding what it is, how to foster it in local language students by varied alternatives, or to examine it in homegrown language teachers has been paramount in published research reports and articles of reflection in Colombia. Different possibilities are at hand, possibilities that account for contextual factors as well as local teachers’ and students’ backgrounds and variables.

This research article presents a study on teacher-educator interactional identities in English language education. The study extends conversation analysis by doing co-analysis and member-checking with three participating teacher-educators to analyze the enactment of their interactional identities in language-based and content-based classes in three different undergraduate programs in English language education. Findings discuss the presence of multiple interactional identities composed of varied forms of being and doing as interactants in the occurring organizations of classroom interaction. These findings highlight the relevance of studying teacher-educator interactional identities to explain how English language education occurs during classroom interaction.

This article describes how classroom interaction occurs between teacher educators (TEs) and students in three undergraduate programs of English language teacher education (ELTE) in Bogotá, Colombia. Thirty-four sessions of classroom instruction of nine TEs were observed and transcribed. Data were analyzed under two methodologies—ethnomethodological conversation analysis (ECA) and self-evaluation of teacher talk (SETT). Findings reveal that ELTE classes are divided into transactional episodes that do not necessarily happen in the same order and that are composed of interaction patterns with an extended pedagogical purpose. Further analysis of these interaction patterns unveils that both TEs and students come into the classroom with a pre-planned conversational agenda which contains pedagogical and interactional purposes. Imbalance between both agendas creates instructional paradoxes that send mixed messages to students about how to interact with TEs in class activities. These findings open a discussion on how the identified patterns create a type of classroom interaction that is rather transactional than spontaneous. This discussion in turn contributes to discovering how classroom interaction may occur in ELTE undergraduate programs and how much of it truly achieves pedagogical and interactional goals.

This article presents a research study on the interactional styles of teacher educators in the English language teacher education classroom. Two research methodologies, ethnomethodological conversation analysis and self-evaluation of teacher talk were applied to analyze 34 content- and language-based classes of nine English language teacher educators of three undergraduate English language teacher education programs in Bogotá, Colombia. Findings show that English language teacher educators’ interactional styles are a mixture of both individual (heterogeneous interactional styles) and common (homogeneous interactional styles) social acts, which are represented by the interactional forms and patterns that these teacher educators display in the classrooms.

This article presents the results of an on-line cross-sectional questionnaire and further discussion about the characterization of ASOCOPI’s affiliates, their expectations of being a member, and the contributions that the association has made to their professional development. The respondents’ answers were analyzed by following a statistical analysis and a content analysis under a survey research approach. Findings reveal that the Association has highly qualified and experienced English teachers who maintain expectations in relation to encountering opportunities to update its teaching and research knowledge, creating professional links, and knowing about academic events and studies in the field. Contributions are oriented to their teaching, research, and professional practices. Discussion highlights prominent issues about the Association’s profile, trends, and ideals.

This research project focuses on identifying and describing the interactional patterns and the speech acts that emerge and are maintainedthrough teacher-student interactions in a university-level EFL Pre-intermediate class. This work also analyzes how these patterns potentiallyinfluence the participants’ interactional behavior. This study then answers two questions: what interactional patterns emerge and how they arestructured in interactions between the teacher and the students in the EFL class? And, how can the utterances that compose the interactionalpatterns potentially influence both interactants’ interactional behavior in the EFL class? The description and analysis of the problem followethnomethodological conversation analysis. The findings show that there are two main interactional patterns in the EFL class observed for thisstudy: asking about content, and adding content. Both patterns present characteristic developments and speech acts that potentially influencethe teacher and students’ interactional behavior in this class. These findings serve as a reference and evidence for the interactional patterns thatemerge in EFL classroom interaction and the influence they have on the way both interactants use the target language in classroom interaction.

This article focuses on the learner’s use of Code-switching to learn the TL (Target Language) equivalent of an L1 word. The interactional pattern that this situation creates defines the Request-Provision-Acknowledgement (RPA) sequence. The article explains each of the turns of the sequence under the combination of the Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis and the Speech Act Analysis. The RPA sequence emerges from the analysis of a set of observations of EFL learners at university level. The insights of this study suggest that this RPA sequence presents pedagogical implications in the dynamics of classroom interaction and the way language learners and teachers negotiate meaning in class.