Constructing Sociocultural Awareness from the EFL Classroom

Abstract

This article reports an action research project carried out with a group of 24 undergraduate students in a private university in Ibagué, Colombia. The study aimed to characterize the development of university students’ sociocultural skills, to analyze their perceptions and to examine the teacher’s procedures and possible implications required to implement the Raising Cultural Consciousness Macrostrategy taken from the Postmethod Pedagogy. To reach these objectives a series of interconnected tasks were designed and implemented in three different stages. To collect the data, five data collection methods were used: the students’ artifacts, teacher’s field notes, questionnaires, video recordings and a focus group. The findings revealed that these university students became gradually aware of the importance of having the opportunity to develop tasks that allowed them to connect the English classroom with the local and global context. Furthermore, students suggested that this type of pedagogy should be an explicit component of the curricula of their professional programs. A review of the literature also showed that in our local context this kind of sociocultural study with a postmethod orientation is scarce, thus this study intends to bridge this gap in the Colombian ELT field