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Unit 2– Task 3- Opinion Article

Adriana Natalia Peña Sanchez

Daimer David Caro

Escuela Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia -

UNAD

Course 551035: Colombian Education

Andres Felipe Chavarro

28 de Noviembre de 2021
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Opinion Article
“Bilingualism” in Colombia: Setting Goals

Some 10 years ago or more, Colombia had set itself the goal of improving the quality of

education and had launched a number of projects to ensure continuity and cohesion in the

education system at all levels. In this context, the National Bilingual Plan consolidated a

strategic project to improve the quality of education, particularly the improvement of foreign

language teaching in Colombia. Since the program was launched, it has sought to meet the

country’s demand for English and focus on cultivating teachers and students in elementary,

secondary and higher education with international standards of English management skills

for everyday life.

This article tries to use a qualitative approach to verify the true situation of bilingualism in

Colombia through the national bilingual plan implemented by the country from 2004 to the

present, and is framed in the field of linguistic research and organizational communication.

Different levels of English attained by educational institutions, including schools, higher

education and faculty, were determined, which resulted in no group achieving the goals set

by the Colombian government.

Because of “the soundness of its proposal and its applicability to the field of education”, the

decision to integrate the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)

forced the academic community to insist that the externalization of language discourse in

education is a mechanism by which foreign standards are adopted as non-existent. A

controversial external authority (Usma Wilches, 2009) uses the lack of information in local

communities to impose a hegemonic discourse (Cárdenas, 2010). As a result, this adoption

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was quickly criticized: Ayala Zárate and Álvarez (2005) faced this decontextualized

implementation of foreign assessment standards and called for the establishment of

precedent-based foreign language education principles. Vargas et al. (2008) also commented

on the out-of-context adoption of the Basic Standards of Competence in Foreign Languages

(BCS): English, which does not use the CEFR and all its rich theoretical analysis, but only

uses its grid capabilities and declarations of power to consider Colombian society,

geographical, political, historical and educational realities. For González (2007), NBP did

not consider the COFE project launched in the 1990s, when the main local universities met

to promote action-research and professional autonomy; for this reason, Álvarez (2008)

emphasized the adoption of post-colonial methods that are used to evaluate the importance

of standards and are critical of the implementation of products by publishers interested in

research. NBP.

Researchers, language teachers, teachers and parents all agreed to have a common goal; a

key point of discussion is whether we are all on the same page, with the same goals and the

same definition of education: training to provide franchise rights from international call

centers for expensive or people-oriented labor, empowerment. However, the government’s

vision of education should not be surprising, because since the enactment of Bilingual

Grammar in mid-2013 to amend the General Education Act to reflect the new framework of

English as a means of employment, people have always believed it. For example, one of the

articles stated that one of its purposes is to develop skills and skills to promote citizen access

to higher education and business and employment opportunities, so Law No. 1651 of 2013

was added to give priority to the English language.

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Therefore, because this study reveals that Colombia generally needs to conduct a qualitative

analysis of the results of national tests on the role of bilingualism in the country, this can not

only establish the current scenario, but also determine the chances of success in the following

areas to create an integral and satisfactory population under the conditions of training and

educational quality developed by the country. The negative consequences of bilingualism,

such as delayed language acquisition, greater interference, and limited vocabulary for each

language, should be addressed; however, the focus has shifted to the positive aspects of

bilingualism, and these positive consequences are not only observed in language work, and

in non-verbal work. Certain components have the potential to influence the positive or

negative effects of bilingualism. Educational schools, especially those related to social

bilinguals, i. e. subjects that live in a bilingual environment, such as Hispanics in the United

States, are large: a deficient learning of one or two languages can have a negative effect, but

a solid learning of two languages can bring significant cognitive and academic benefits.
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