A Study of the English Teaching Practice at a Language Institute

Abstract

This study aims to describe the pedagogical practices that take place at the Language Institute of a university based on the observation of classes, questionnaires and interviews of teachers and students. In order to achieve the purpose of the project, the researchers adopted a qualitative approach and also combined an ethnographic perspective which denotes a constant reflection on the part of the teachers who participated as objects of the study. The results of the study demonstrate that most of the teachers employ the PPP (Presentation, Practice, and Production) model to language teaching and that the students make use of direct and indirect strategies in order to help themselves learning.

Exploring EFL Teaching and Learning Processes in Two Undergraduate Mandatory Courses

“…They frequently used the textbook as the main source of knowledge and upon which to base their class tasks. In a way, this echoed Bastidas's (2017) and Posada-Ortiz and Patiño-Garzón's (2007) studies in the sense that the teaching of English in Colombia has been textbook-oriented. The teachers mostly used textbooks to teach grammar structures and gap-filling exercises.…”

“…In Colombia, recent studies have found that English language teaching at some universities is dominated by some methodologies focused mainly on grammar instruction (Jiménez et al, 2017;Pavas-Amado, 2017;Sánchez-Solarte et al, 2017). Perhaps one exception to such tendency was identified by Posada-Ortiz and Patiño-Garzón (2007), who studied the efl teaching methodology at Universidad del Valle and found that it was based on cooperative learning and the communicative approach. Second, Bastidas (2017), who investigated methods and approaches in efl teaching in Colombian history, found that, mostly, the methodologies have been textbook-oriented.…”