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2007 dissonate with the peripheral socioeconomic and cultural particularities. In this context, this paper
attempts to point out three main issues of social injustice being deepened thanks to the current language
policy: 1 depromotion of equity and pluralism. 2 Disempowering local knowledge. 3 widening the
urbanrural gap. I end the paper concluding that there is a need to reflect critically about the actions taken to
respond to globalisation by improving local conditions too.
2. 1 Depromotion of Equity and Pluralism
It is worth noting that the establishment and progress of the NPB have conflicted with the aims of
education towards the promotion of pluralism, justice, and equity of the country described in the General Law
of Education MEN, 1994, Article 5. The NPB imposes English as the only foreign language to be
included in the national curriculum; thus, a ‘packed’, ‘monolithic’ and ‘homogeneous’ perspective of
bilingualism Guerrero, 2008 became the rule. Thus, as Guerrero suggests the struggle towards pluralism
and equity get hindered by the imposition of a single language, whose learning represents advantages
mainly to dominant groups. This scholar supports her views on the facts that there is only one option to
choose to be a recognised bilingual in the Colombian context and that there are no standards for the teaching
of any other language. In addition, although the programme appears to be intended for all children at
school, Guerrero points out how due to the unbalanced socieconomic and cultural characteristics of the
country, the alleged opportunities for all are in fact for just a few. Similarly, other scholars Cruz-Arcila, 2013;
Sánchez Obando, 2008 have maintained that the adoption of national standards to promote the learning
of a single foreign language does not account for the cultural diversity and difference of the regions of
Colombia. That is certaily the case of the undervalue now awarded to other forms of bilingualism with local
minority Amerindian or Creole languages. They are now usually associated with an “`invisible` form of
bilingualism related to underdevelopment, poverty and backwardness” De-Mejía, 2006, p. 154. This last
point of discussion, in turn relates to issues of denigration of local knowledge I address next.
2.2
Disempowerment of Local Knowledge
In the framework of the NPB, at the expense of local institutions and realities, the government gave power
to international organisations to lead professional development programmes for teachers, provide
teaching materials and test students and teachers as well as to develop the standards that would “guide” the
teaching of English in Colombia. Hence, local knowledge and culture have been disempowered,
languages have become stratified and language teaching and learning have been instrumentalised
González, 2009; Usma Wilches, 2009 on the basis of an alleged universality, progress and benefit for all
embedded in dominant discourses Canagarajah, 2005. At the same time, despite the current ‘irrelevance’ and
critical views on the power and priviledge of the native speaker model in a world with emerging varieties of
English see Graddol, 2006; Kramsch, 2003, local teachers of English have been placed at a secondary
level. Consequently, ‘imported monolingual teachers’ as De-Mejía 2006 referred to native English teachers,
started to be seen as prestige-givers to educational institutions and thus offered ample and better
remunerated job opportunities.
2.3
Widening the RuraUrban Gap
Perhaps, the most notorious tensions between the global and the local is experienced in rural areas. These
tensions have in turn made more salient the historical problems of social injustice evident in the mistribution
of resources and opportunities as well as misrecognition of local realities. Rural locales of the
country have been historically subjected to be undervalued since the development model of the
country has traditionally been urban-oriented PNUD, 2011. Hence, as the United Nations Programme for
Development PNUD for its initials in Spanish reports, one third of people who live in rural areas are in
conditions of extreme poverty; and coverage of education is 2.5 less times than in urban zones. In
addition, the dropout rates in rural settings are significantly higher due to several reasons such as
children having to travel long distances, lack of schools, parents not being able to afford their children’s
education or children being required to work Lackin Gasperini, 2004; WorldBank, 2007
. Similarly, it
has been shown that only 3.5 of rural students can have access to higher education López Núñez,
2007. These social problems impact the rural EFL classroom since in many of these regions, the priority
for families is to try to cope with economic constraints and get on. An example of this is a recent study
Bonilla Cruz-Arcila, Forthcoming which suggests that, in the view of some teachers, it is hard for both
parents and students to make sense of learning English at some rural schools since they neither have much real
contact with it nor see English to be of much help to meet their economic needs and cultural values. As a
consequence, EFL teachers in rural environments have to deal with the fact that in local communities, learning
English might represent “a world that [is] remote and threatening and far removed from family and friends…”
Canagarajah, 1999, p.9
A further dimension of struggle for rural educational processes is the lack of support. Some reports see for
example Lackin Gasperini, 2004; Novoa Barrera, 2004; WorldBank, 2007 show that learning resources
in rural schools are limited, rooms are usually overcrowded, and teachers are usually isolated and
poorly paid. Moreover, although coverage of internet
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access and use of ICT have increased in recent years, they are still major disadvantages in rural institutions
see Fedesarrollo, 2011; MEN, 2010. In these circumstances, rural EFL teachers count on less
resources and more difficult conditions to try to meet the learning goals described above. In terms of
professional development, rural EFL teachers, especially those who work in remote locations, find
additional constraints to have access to the opportunities of professional development offered by
the MEN
2
. Even if they do, as suggested in a previous study Bonilla Medina Cruz-Arcila, 2013, they
might not find training in mainstream language teaching methodologies as useful as alternative
modalities of professional growth oriented to understand and get involved in the local community.
This is certainly true in the case of Jaraba Ramírez and Arrieta Carrascal 2012 who through ethnographical
approaches could reach a better understanding of cultural practices of a group of rural indigenous EFL
students; and based on that, device their own methodological strategies to make learning English
more meaningful in their school.
To make things more problematic, at least in my view, although the language policy is aimed to have a nation-
wide coverage, the complexities of the rural EFL classroom have remained invisible. In the national
context, public discourses on bilingualism or foreign language teaching hardly ever include or address the
rural classroom. Perhaps, due to the urban- centeredness of the country, attention and awareness of
what happens in the rural classroom have proved to be insufficient. Even local researchers seem to have fallen
into the mainstream dinamics of urbanism and the real complexities and opportunities of the rural classroom
are still to be visibilised. The idea that in the current language policy local teachers are invisible has already
been pointed out by Guerrero 2010, who, in her critical discourse analysis of the document of standards
for teaching English and other public documents, argues that not only are Colombian teachers invisible
but also given the role of clercks and technicians
3
. However, I also argue that rural teachers, in particular,
have been hitherto excluded from academic discourses. In a review of publications of research reports of well-
known local journals in the field of ELT in Colombia, reference to the rural reality is limited to exporadic
allusions to how more difficult it must be for teachers in these locations to successfully teach English. The
study by Jaraba Ramírez and Arrieta Carrascal 2012 mentioned above represents, to the best of my
2
Currently the MEN offers opportunities for professional development in the form of inmersion
courses, English or methodology taught courses, and training in the use of virtual resources See MEN,
n.d.
3
In her study, Guerrero 2010 points out that local EFL teachers’ knowledge and voices have been
knowledge, one of the very few research studies conducted in a rural milieu in this field up to 2012.
3. Perspective on Social Justice
