Addressing students’ social reality through the exploration of community inquiries in the English language class can create learning environments for developing students´ language and literacies. This paper addresses the question in what ways community inquiries create opportunities for students to explore social and cultural issues in their neighborhoods using multimodality. It discusses the role community inquiries play in the development of literacy practices of a group of 10th graders in their EFL class. This descriptive qualitative project carried out at a public institution in the south of Bogotá, Colombia involved 40 participants. The goal of the institutional project is to transform the way students relate to the community in order to create local knowledge. Data was collected through videotape recordings of students´ presentations, teacher´s journal, students´ interactions in Facebook and students´ blogs in a 2-year period. The findings reveal that teachers and students enacted a critical pedagogy through an inquiry curriculum that explored community issues and allowed participants to become inquirers of their own realities. Students´ language learning was evident in multimodal texts in English in their blogs, in the use of EFL in their oral presentations and in their comments in response to peers in Facebook and their blogs.

As a coeditor of CALJ, I would like to draw your attention to the rising importance of identity studies in the EFL setting and their contribution to the field. The Socratic imperative “know thyself” has inspired teacher researchers around the world (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006; Cheung, 2015; Johnson & Golombek, 2016; Norton, 2013) to raise awareness towards knowledge-power relations affecting our own constitution as subjects (Foucault, 1980). From a post-structuralist view, the comprehension of identity as something not given but constituted has illuminated a type of research more interested in revealing how interior and exterior forces—in Deleuze’s (1993) words—influence our constitution as subjects of a practice. In the field of EFL, research examining identity contributes to the understanding of who English teachers and learners are and how these identities are related to the teaching and learning process.

An analysis of the thematic tendencies in the 41 research articles published in the issues of the Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal during the last three years, 2013-2015, indicates that authors have focused their attention primarily on five topics. These themes can be grouped as a) Trends and Approaches to teaching English as a foreign language, with the highest number of articles, followed by b) language learners´ processes and outcomes, c) teacher education for both preservice and inservice teachers, d) critical literacy and literacy involving social development, and d) uses of Spanish as expression of popular culture and English as a sociolinguistic phenomenon in San Andres. The variety of research reflected in these five thematic groups certainly contributes to addressing the two target disciplines our journal is interested in: Applied Linguistics and English Language Education in the context of Colombia and Latin America.

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