Abstract
In student-teachers’ education, it is fundamental to foster the intercultural communicative competence for them to express their views on cultural concepts and phenomena in written and orally, with native and non-native speakers of a foreign language. In the same vein, future foreign language teachers, particularly at an early stage of their learning process, are expected to possess some basic citizen competencies which allow them, amongst other things, to show an understanding of the country they live in, the cultural diversity it has, and the current situation they and their co-nationals are facing (cognitive dimension). 
 Bering in mind the importance of competences mentioned before. This short-scale quantitative study set out to classify the perceptions that a group of student-teachers had on Colombia, their cultural identity, and Colombians’ cultural identity in general. To that end, one oral and two written short narratives along with a final questionnaire were collected and analysed using Atlas TI. 8 and Excell spreadsheets. The counting and classification of prominent speech parts that conveyed perceptions (nouns, nouns plus adjectives and adjective per se) unveiled that participants held quite optimistic views on their nation, particularly in cultural, natural, geographic, and culinary aspects. It was also revealed that student-teachers had a high appreciation of themselves culturally speaking, praising their personality and mood as most important features. Furthermore, it was unveiled that participants held a positive view about their compatriots, highlighting their personality, mood, and character. It is important to remark that positive views about own identity were much higher than general views on Colombians.
Highlights
In student-teachers’ education, it is fundamental to foster the intercultural communicative competence for them to express their views on cultural concepts and phenomena in written and orally, with native and non-native speakers of a foreign language
The variable being measured here was labelled Views on Colombia, and the unit of analysis were on the one hand, the nouns which participants used to refer to their country and on the other hand, the collocations adjective plus noun they made use of to describe their nation
The first coding phase was conducted by classifying all nouns and adjective-nouns collocations into negative and positive, according to the context in which they appeared, and the interpretation researchers made about the way they were used in the narratives
Summary
In student-teachers’ education, it is fundamental to foster the intercultural communicative competence for them to express their views on cultural concepts and phenomena in written and orally, with native and non-native speakers of a foreign language. In-situ experience and the results obtained in an exploratory questionnaire, we could find that despite the new curriculum of the English Language programme at a Colombian public university states expressly that prospective teachers shall possess a standard level of performance in intercultural and diverse contexts while expressing views and perspectives about cultural phenomena and concepts in L2, participants in this study have been mostly mostly exposed to linguistic content and language-oriented activities, developing speaking, writing, listening, and reading skill instead of developing as well other relevant competences that they require to perform suitably as educators in the current Colombian educational setting. There are some appealing investigations carried out in different educational scenarios that are worth being mentioned in the national milieu, as the one conducted by Motta (2015), where highly constituent elements of Colombian cultural heritage were explored and analysed; the one led by Bedoya et al (2015),where some didactic units were tailored to enrich highschoolers’ cultural knowledge about Colombia; the critical discourse analysis research of National Geographic done by Pérez-Marín (2017), in which Colombian identity was associated with negative aspects such as weak governments, poverty and Colombian dependance upon powerful nations such as the U.S.A; the comparative study conducted by Beltrán (2015), which inquired into the perceptions of some student-teachers from a Colombian and a Chilean university about source culture topic, which encouraged them to learn English, and the investigation done by Beltrán and Vela (2017), which sought to enhance English prospective educators’ teaching skills to incorporate local culture elements in L2 lessons through artistic manifestations, valuing and understanding cultural diversity
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