Following the trend of much of the Western, non-English speaking world, Colombia has tirelessly strived for spreading English education in an effort to augment economic benefits. This paper aims at providing a critical account of foreign language education policy in Colombia, with special attention to English. It outlines the impact of its multiple transitions over the past decades through a historical description that overviews all previous policies, the critical reception by scholars, and present-day initiatives. We then move on to analysing the choice of English as a synonym for bilingualism and conclude with emerging questions that are to be considered for future debates and reassessments of Colombia's English-Spanish bilingual education policy.Key words: Bilingual education in Colombia, Common European Framework of Reference, language policy, linguistic colonialism.Siguiendo una tendencia general en el Occidente no anglófono, Colombia ha intentado incansablemente difundir la educación en lengua inglesa en aras de alcanzar beneficios económicos. Este artículo busca ofrecer una descripción crítica de la política de enseñanza de lengua extranjera: inglés. Se considera el impacto de las múltiples transiciones que ha sufrido la misma a lo largo de los años mediante una descripción histórica de las anteriores iniciativas, la recepción de parte de los académicos y la propuesta actual del gobierno. Finalmente, se analiza la elección del inglés como sinónimo de bilingüismo para concluir con las dudas que suscita la política actual a fin de abrir un futuro debate y revaloración sobre la educación bilingüe español-inglés.Palabras clave: colonialismo lingüístico, educación bilingüe en Colombia; Marco Común Europeo de Referencia, política lingüística.

El método Gramática-Traducción es considerado el enfoque más tradicionalista e inefectivo por antonomasia. Tal opinión suele justificarse mediante la creencia de que antes del método Audiolingüe no se lograba la destreza oral; la enseñanza constituía la memorización de reglas gramaticales y listas de vocabulario. No obstante, tal opinión se deriva de afirmaciones aún por corroborar, emitidas principalmente por autores mal informados y sin evidencia de base empírica que sustente sus prescripciones restrictivas, lo que conduce a malinterpretar el influjo de la traducción, negándole su valor de estrategia metacognitiva. Este artículo argumenta que la Gramática-Traducción es simplemente una etiqueta histórica arbitraria, desarrollada por teóricos para abarcar la historia de la enseñanza de idiomas desde 1790 hasta 1950. Así, se revisan críticamente distintas referencias a la Gramática-Traducción para demostrar que emergen como inferencias basadas en evidencia parcial para dar cuenta de la existencia de tal metodología. La asunción acrítica de que la Gramática-Traducción sí existió, y de que es el modelo negativo de práctica docente que debe ser evitado a toda costa, refleja un interés ideológico y nocivo por parte de teóricos y profesores.

This study explores the amount of lexical innovation (hapax legomena or non repeated words) during a question-led (i.e. semi spontaneous) spoken word production task. Native adult non-impaired Spanish speakers (n = 8) were asked the same question 8 times with an interval of one day each; 4 participants answered the stimulus question in L1 and 4 did so in English. Participants were also given specific instructions to avoid conscious verbal monitoring, specially trying to evade or emphasise word repetition. Their responses were not time controlled. Quantitative word analysis reveals all subjects have recourse to an increased percentage of lexical recycling (vocabulary repetition), idiomatic and phraseology recurrence, as well as a limited percentage of lexical innovation or hapax. These findings are of interest to foreign language acquisition research, curricula design and idiolect re-encoding because they suggest that thematic-bound unities of thought elicited in word production are stable and comprise a major portion of all verbal content. These results may call into question the pertinence and efficacy of traditional syllabi focusing on linguistic points rather than on the role of recycling thematic-dependent learners' verbal repertoire.

This paper provides an analysis of the variables that determine the syntactic distribution of ecce, a presentative adverb in Latin. Traditionally, grammarians have simply regarded ecce as an adverb (similar to here) or an interjection (similar to hey!) but this lexicographic view misses important syntactic phenomena. For example, adverbs in Latin can follow subjects, but ecce cannot. Interjections can be used as single words to express surprise, but ecce, as a presentative, is never used in the absence of a following determiner phrase (DP). Two corpora of almost seven million Latin words ranging from ∼200 BCE to 1800 CE were analyzed for instances of ecce. Adopting a cartographic approach, results suggest that ecce, as a presentative, is base-generated in the head of a Focus phrase (FocP) projection in the matrix clause. This is confirmed through its consistent precedence of subjects, scope over left-dislocated constituents in [Spec, FocP], and its ungrammaticality in the embedded domain. This study brings to light several theoretical implications for the under-studied category of presentatives by showing how discourse and hierarchical properties license the use of ecce and restrict its contexts of use.

No abstract