Pre-service language teachers as multilingual mediators

Abstract

In Colombia, language teaching – English language teaching, more precisely –has been focused for the last three decades on improving methods for teaching linguistic and communicative competence. This chapter examines how short drama games and plays can aid pre-service English language teachers – recipients of the Colombian government’s scholarship program “It pays to be clever” – to create their own intercultural English language education resources for mediation in critical incidents resulting from their own experiences in a context of social inequality and civil war. The effectiveness of the SPP scholarship program in increasing access to higher education for low-income students with academic excellence has been documented and affirmed. The case study reported in the chapter demonstrates that the adoption of drama strategies in the English language classroom, coupled with critical intercultural pedagogy, prompted pre-service English language teachers to undergo deep processes of analysis and reflection on their teaching practices.