professional empowerment of efl in-service teachers through language policy and decision making

PROFESSIONAL EMPOWERMENT OF EFL IN-SERVICE TEACHERS THROUGH

LANGUAGE POLICY AND DECISION MAKING IN EFL NATIONAL PROGRAMS

50TH ASOCOPI ANNUAL CONFERENCEHalf a century making history in Colombia

ELT – Tracing back our footstepsOctober 8, 9, and 10, 2015

YAMITH JOSÉ FANDIÑO PARRA – LA SALLE UNIVERSITY, BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA

CONTENTS

Introduction

Language policy: EFL, local level, national EFL programs, and Colombian ELT community

Methodology : paradigm, approach, design, questions, objectives, setting, participants, data collection, data analysis.

Findings: documents, surveys, and focus groups.

Discussion

Conclusion


INTRODUCTION


INTRODUCTION

It goes without saying that the implementation of language policies and the reach of teachers’ decision making are highly connected to the acknowledgement of their voices as political and pedagogical agents.

Within the framework of national EFL programs, teachers' voices need to be heard as they are deeply connected to the intellectual, emotional, and educational realities of their communities (Giroux, 1988).

By having their voice valued, EFL teachers can have access to opportunities where their concerns and suggestions may transform the systems that exclude them, which in the long run can impact positively their lives and those of their students.

This state of affairs demands the adoption and development of consistent and solid discourses aimed at providing the EFL Colombian community with strategies to critically examine how linguistic and socio-cultural practices are constructed, legitimated, and contested (Kubota, 2004).


1. LANGUAGE POLICY

Language policy (statements of intent) and planning (implementation) is defined as a set of actions and processes, often large scale and national, usually undertaken by governments with the purpose of influencing, if not changing, ways of speaking or literacy practices within a society (Baldauf, 2004).

Baldauf proposed a framework that adopts a goal-orientation to the four activity types (i.e., status planning, corpus planning, language-in-education planning, and prestige planning) typically used to define the discipline and examines these across policy and cultivation planning. He suggests that awareness of such goals may be overt (explicit, planned) or covert (implicit, unplanned), and may occur at several different levels (macro, meso, and micro).


1.1. LANGUAGE POLICY AND EFL

When talking about language policy and EFL teachers, Ricento and Hornberger (1996) pointed out that this kind of policy may appear quite theoretical and far removed from the lives of many English language teaching practitioners.

External politics has traditionally influenced which language or which variety of that language learners will acquire, and what its function will be in their future life. Such traditional approach to language policy regards this process as one already decided before the EFL professional enters the classroom.

To them, this is unfortunate since EFL professionals are involved in the processes of language planning and making. They claim that educational and social change in general and language policy in particular need to begin with the grass roots (educators, parents, students, and communities), as they are the ones in charge of mobilizing innovation in schools and in classes.


1.2. LANGUAGE POLICY IN THE LOCAL OR MICRO LEVEL

Amir (2013) explained that, even though there are both implicit and explicit language policies, interaction and sequential analyses expose how de facto practices enshrine in the local or micro level of language policy. This level is understood as how a policy is played out in situ in the foreign language classroom.

Such a term contrasts with a more fixed and static conceptualization of language policy, whereby a prescribed set of norms are readily available for implementation. On the contrary, it aims to capture the dynamic, co-constructed and situated nature of language policy as opposed to the workplan conceived by the policy makers.

In brief and in line with a policy-in process approach, studies about the micro-level language policy strive to shift their focus from the task-as-workplan to the task-in-process, i.e. what actually happens in the classroom (p. 86).


1.3. LANGUAGE POLICY AND NATIONAL EFL PROGRAMS

The adequacy of the country's conditions for bilingualism: Few classroom hours dedicated to the teaching of English, a shortage of materials and qualified teachers and few opportunities to use authentic English communication (Cardenas, 2006).

The difficulties experienced by this project: Not simply a lack of interest or language level of Colombian teachers, but a need to improve the conditions in which teaching and learning occur in Colombia (Sánchez & Obando, 2008).

Little inclusion and large exclusion: Opportunities for some groups and individuals, but inequality and social stratification based on standardization and instrumentalization (Usma, 2009).

Tension between language policy, curriculum guidelines and actual conditions in the schools : A lack of macro and micro articulation to assume bilingual learning processes as a meaningful interplay between L1 and L2 (Fandiño, 2014).


1.4. LANGUAGE POLICY AND THE COLOMBIAN ELT COMMUNITY

The Colombian ELT community has not quite managed to open up real and concrete possibilities for EFL in-service teachers to articulate and exercise realistically their personal and professional voices in their institutions and regions. This is not simply related to helping them share their experiences, realities, and worlds, but more importantly by providing them with spaces and processes, in which they can reflect about the values, ideologies, and principles they use when understanding and mediating their histories and subjectivities (McLaren, 2002).

In this regard, Becerra (2005) claimed that being the school a social microcosm, the forces around it are present in teachers’ practices and discourses. To her, this demands from them becoming aware of what they are doing and saying and reflecting critically how they might be favoring the continuation of unequal practices and processes. Ultimately, teachers will become stronger and more autonomous as they become more responsible in transforming reality and increasing their power to do it (p. 50).


2. METHODOLOGY: PARADIGM, APPROACH, AND DESIGN


BASIC QUALITATIVE RESEARCH DESIGN

In conducting a basic qualitative study, you seek to discover and understand a phenomenon, a process, the perspectives and worldviews of the people involved, or a combination of these (Merriam, 2002, p. 6).

QUALITATIVE APPROACHAn approach for exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human

problem (Creswell, 2014, p. 4).

INTERPRETIVIST/CONSTRUCTIVIST PARADIGM Interpretivist/constructivist approaches to research have the intention of understanding "the world of human

experience" (Cohen & Manion, 1994, p.36), suggesting that "reality is socially constructed" (Mertens, 2005, p.12).

2.1. METHODOLOGY: QUESTIONS, OBJECTIVES, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS


• How do EFL in-service teachers interpret national EFL programs in public schools in Bogotá?

Research question

• Explore meanings EFL in-service teachers give to national EFL programs

• Describe experiences EFL in-service teachers have when working with national EFL programs.

Research objectives • Two public schools south of

Bogotá.• Colegio Cafam Santa Lucía

and Colegio Mercedes Nariño.• 2nd or 3rd social strata.

• 20 EFL in-service teachers.• 3 -5 years experience in public

sector. • Most with specializations in

EFL methodology and a few with master’s degrees in education.

Research setting and participants

2.1. METHODOLOGY: DATA COLLECTION

DocumentsPublic and private records that qualitative researchers obtain, which provide valuable information in helping researchers understand central phenomena (Creswell, 2012, p. 223).

SurveysA procedure in which investigators administer a questionnaire to a sample in order to identify and describe trends in the attitudes, opinions, behaviors, or characteristics of a population (Creswell, 2012, p. 376)

Focus groupsProcess of collecting data through interviews with a group of people, typically four to six. The researcher asks a small number of general questions and elicits responses from all individuals in the group (Creswell, 2012, p. 218).


2.1. METHODOLOGY: DATA ANALYSIS (Chambliss & Schutt, 2012)


Documentation

Conceptualization, coding and categorizing

Examining relationshipts and displaying data

Corraborating and legitimazing

Reporting

3. FINDINGS

DOCUMENTS


3. FINDINGS

SURVEYS


3. FINDINGS

FOCUS GROUP


4. DISCUSSION

Teacher decision making (Villareal, 2005)

Decision making is about making informed choices for solutions to classroom problems and issues. It is about feeling capable to make these decisions. It is about teachers given a decision-making opportunity and getting the organizational support to successfully implement these choices.

Teachers’ engagement in decision making can be defined at two levels: classroom level for individual judgments and school level for collective judgments. Their involvement requires the development of both collective and individual decision-making skills.

Teachers can demonstrate appropriate application of decision making when they are given space and time to:

- follow the steps of making a good decision,

- support decisions with research-based knowledge or experience, and

- demonstrate assessment of alternative actions and a decision’s possible impact.


4. DISCUSSION

Understanding EFL in-service teachers as decision makers requires Colombia’s government to recognize policy as a sociocultural process that transcends official or legally authorized designations. Instead, policy should be understood as a process of human interaction, negotiation, and resistance, what Levinson, Sutton and Winstead (2009) call appropriation.

Appropriation refers to “the ways that creative agents interpret and take in elements of policy, thereby incorporating these discursive resources into their own schemes of interest, motivation, and action” (Levinson et al., 2009, p. 779).

Finally, the appropriation of language policy by EFL in-service teachers encourages one to interpret ambiguities and gaps as opportunities for transformative pedagogical interventions. Such interventions give rise to teacher agency. This agency is typically viewed as a quality within educators, a matter of personal capacity to act usually in response to stimuli within their pedagogical environment (Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2012, p. 3).


4. DISCUSSION

Although in-service EFL teachers try to reproduce or replicate official discourses through particular classroom language practices, such reproduction is never total and in some cases is eclipsed by strong adaptations and contestations.

In this regard, Hornberger and Johnson (2011) proposed ethnography of language policy as a method that can be used to approach the multiple levels of policy activity in order to better understand both the power of language policies to marginalize and the power of educators to adapt and resist.


5. CONCLUSION

Overall, this study offers evidence that suggests that in-service EFL teachers need to be incorporated into language policy and decision making. By doing so, programs such as Bogota Bilingüe can effectively take into account their meanings, experiences, and perspectives of EFL practitioners, which can lead to the reconfiguration and reinterpretation of the discourses and practices official bilingualism and mainstream EFL instruction seem to be based on. Ultimately, having in-service EFL teachers act as main participants can help official actions and decisions

“superar políticas instrumentalistas y proyectos programáticos caracterizados por el desconocimiento de la voz de los actores del proceso” (Bermúdez, Fandiño & Ramírez, 2015, p. 166).


REFERENCES

Amir, L. (2013). Self-policing in the English as a foreign language classroom. Novitas: Research on Youth and Language, 7(2), 84-105.

Baldauf, R. (2006). Rearticulating the case for micro language planning in a language ecology context. Current Issues in Language Planning, 7(2), 147-170. doi: 10.2167/cilp092.0

Baldauf, R. (2004). Language planning and policy: Recent trends, future directions. American Association of Applied Linguistics, Portland, Oregon, (1-8). Retrieved from http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:24518/LPPCoPap1AAAL04.pdf

Bermúdez, J., Fandiño, Y., & Ramírez, A. (2015). Percepciones de directivos y docentes de instituciones educativas distritales sobre la implementación del Programa Bogotá Bilingüe. Voces Y Silencios: Revista Latinoamericana De Educación, 5(2), 135-171.

Cárdenas, M. (2006). Bilingual Colombia: Are we ready for it? What is needed? Paper presented at the 19th EA Annual Education Conference, Perth, Australia. Retrieved from http://www.docstoc.com/docs/32866051/Bilingual-Colombia-Are-we-ready-for-it-What-is-needed.

Chambliss, D., & Schutt, R. (2012). Making Sense of the Social World: Methods of Investigation 4th (fourth) Edition. USA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Cooper, R. (1989). Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Correa, D., y Usma, J. (2013). From a burocratic to a critical-sociocultural model of policymaking in Colombia. HOW A Colombian journal of teachers of English, 20, 226-242.

Creswell, J. (2014). Research design: qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches (4th edition). USA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Creswell, J.W. (2003). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. (2nd ed.) Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Fandiño Y. (2014). Bogotá bilingüe: tensión entre política, currículo y realidad escolar. Revista Educación y Educadores, 17(2), 215-236.

Freeman, R. D. (1996). Dual-language planning at Oyster Bilingual School: “It’s much more than language”. TESOL Quarterly, 30 (3), 557-582.

Giroux, H. (1988). Schooling and the struggle for public life: Critical pedagogy in the modern age. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press.


http://www.docstoc.com/docs/32866051/Bilingual-Colombia-Are-we-ready-for-it-What-is-needed

REFERENCES

Hornberger, N., & Johnson, D. (2011). The ethnography of language policy. In T. L. McCarty (Ed.), Ethnography and language policy (pp. 273–289). New York and London: Routledge.

Kubota, R. (2004). Critical multiculturalism and second language education. In B. Norton & K. Toohey, (Eds.), Critical pedagogies and language learning (pp. 30-52). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kumar, D., & Scuderi, P. (2000). Teachers Network Leadership Institute: Opportunities for Teachers as Policy Makers. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 36(2), 61-64.

Lavon, P. (2011). Gaining global perspective: educational language policy and planning. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 14(6), 733-749. DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2011.579949

Levinson, B., Sutton, M., & Winstead, T. (2009). Education policy as a practice of power. Educational Policy, (23), 767–795.

Mertens, D.M. (2005). Research methods in education and psychology: Integrating diversity with quantitative and qualitative approaches. (2nd ed.) Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Merriam, S. (2009). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. USA: Jossey-Bass.

Merriam, S. (2002). Qualitative research in practice: Examples for discussion and analysis. USA: Jossey-Bass.

Ministerio de Educación Nacional. (2014). Programa Nacional de Inglés 2015-2025: Colombia very well. Bogotá: MEN.

Priestley, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2012). Understanding Teacher Agency: The Importance of Relationships. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Vancouver, 13-17 April. Retrieved from http://www.stir.ac.uk/media/schools/education/documents/teacheragency/Teacher%20agency_AERA%20paper_final.pdf

Ricento, T., & Hornberger, N. (1996). Unpeeling the Onion: Language Planning and Policy and the ELT Professional. TESOL Quarterly, 30(3), 401-427.

Sánchez, A. & Obando, G. (2008). Is Colombia ready for "Bilingualism"? PROFILE Issues in Teachers' Professional Development, 9, 181-195.

Spolsky, B. (2009). Language Management. Cambridge: CUP.

Usma, W. (2009). Education and language policy in Colombia: Exploring processes of inclusion, exclusion, and stratification in times of global reform. PROFILE Issues in Teachers' Professional Development, 11, 123-141.

Villareal, A. (2005, May). Rethinking Professional Development as a Tool to Stimulate Teacher’s Decision Making Authority. Intercultural development research association newsletter, 32(5). Retrieved from http://www.idra.org/IDRA_Newsletter/May_2005_Self_-_Renewing_Schools_Teaching_Quality/
