Improving Technlogy and English Instruction in Columbia

This week, I came across an interesting site called EdTechTimes.  It is a news site about the educational technology industry.  The particular post that came across my alerts is actually a SoundCloud clip containing an interview with Ana Maria Ternent de Samper, a foreign language professor at Universidad de La Sabana in Columbia.  It is part of a series of interviews they will be sharing from the TESOL Columbia for TESOL International.  She talked about how the university is working to move into the digital age, and how both the university and Columbia in general are striving to make improvements in English education.  

According to Ana Maria, the university is working to make changes both within itself and in the surrounding community.  Within the in university there has been more interest in adding new technologies for teaching.  They have begun to offer more blended and online classes, including a masters in teaching English.  The goal of this program is to prepare teachers to help students – and themselves – become more autonomous English Language Learners.  Within community, the university is offering extension programs to work with teachers and schools.  Ana Maria admits that this has been very difficult, because teachers feel their jobs are fairly stable, so there is not as much need to transform teaching practices.  In addition, with the fast pace of technological advances, teachers are preparing students for a future may be unknown.  For example, programs are being added at the university that didn’t exist when students were in high school.  For this reason, it is necessary for the teachers to embrace changes.  In addition, they are dealing with both an incredible access to technology, and at the same time, incredible poverty where there is no technology, so teachers need to learn how to balance that and how to get education to those people who need it most.  

Ana Maria says that the focus is on making the switch from trying to solve problems that the students and society in general might have, and instead capitalizing on strengths.  In her words, “instead of a needs based approach, it is more of an assets based approach.”  The goal is to empower people to find their own solutions.

She then goes on to talk a little bit about English learning in Columbia.  There are strong English and foreign language programs in the schools.  In fact, some students come to the university from bilingual high schools, so they do not need much English instruction.  The university is working to improve their offerings for English education, including offering major subjects taught in English.  This is an attempt to counter some of the lack of student motivation in to study English in higher education.  The country of Columbia itself has a goal of working to becoming totally bilingual, and to be most educated country in Latin America.  The Ministry of Education is creating national programs with clear objectives, but at this point these objectives are not being met before the students enroll in the university.  It is an ongoing initiative, and educators are working towards achieving that goal.

Listen to the interview, and follow up with other interviews from TESOL Columbia, by going to “Heard at TESOL Colombia: How Universidad deLa Sabana Is Supporting the Growth of English Language Learning in Colombia”.

In my own experience as an ESL teacher here in the United States, I have had one student from Columbia who moved into my classroom as an eleventh grader.  He already had good English conversational skills, and his academic language was much higher than a traditional newcomer.  I assumed that he was from a well-educated family and possibly in private school, but after hearing this interview I understand more of the importance his native country places on learning English.  It makes sense that he was more advanced than the other students I was getting who were coming from Guatemala and El Salvador.  It seems that Columbia is a strong path of meeting its students’ technological and English learning needs.  I’m hopeful that other countries look to this as a model to make improvements to their educational programs as well.