Editorial

How to cite this article (APA 6th ed.):
Cárdenas, M. L. (2016). Editorial. HOW, 23(1), 7-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.19183/how.23.1.305.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. License Deed can be consulted at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

I am delighted to present the first issue of our twenty-third volume. It comes with good news regarding the presence of our journal in international scenarios. First, it is a pleasure to share with our affiliates and readership the indexation of our journal in CLASE (Citas Latinoamericanas en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades) and Dialnet. This accomplishment can guarantee a wider visibility of the works we publish and adds positive points to the evaluation processes carried out by Publindex-Colciencias, the national indexing system for journals edited in Colombia.

Such an achievement is the result of joint efforts and the generous collaboration of many people: the advisory and editorial committees, our assistants, the ASOCOPI’s Board of Directors, the guidance received from the PROFILE Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development Journal, edited at Universidad Nacional de Colombia – Bogotá Campus, and the affiliates of ASOCOPI. I should also acknowledge the role of Pearson Colombia, who has supported the publication of our journal online. Their collaboration has been vital toward allowing open access to our publication via the Open Journal System.

In this volume our readership can find seven papers dealing with pedagogical processes and teacher education.

The Research Reports section gathers four articles. We begin with the article by Orlando Chaves who depicts the design, implementation, and assessment of a didactic sequence for teaching English as a foreign language in the first grade of a primary school in Cali, Colombia. The author points out that didactic material should follow the pacing of the teachers’ academic work and has to be closely linked to the reality of both teachers and students. As often mentioned in academic forums, the introduction of English in primary schools is very much in need of systematized experiences. It is hoped that more teachers will feel encouraged to contribute to our understanding of what happens with ELT (English Language Teaching) in that educational level by sending more works to our journal.

The following article authored by Mexican teachers Silvia Arizmendi Tejeda, Barbara Scholes Gillings de González, and Cecilio Luis de Jesús López Martínez describes how novice EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers regulate their negative emotions during their initial teaching practice. As we can learn in their report, the use of semi-structured interviews and observations allowed the researchers to identify that different emotional strategies play a paramount role in the regulation of future teachers’ adverse emotions.

Next follows the article by Fabián Padilla De La Cerda who presents an account of the process of designing and partially implementing and evaluating a content-based and genre-oriented syllabus that sought to promote reading strategies and comprehension of natural science texts in a group of adolescents of a public school in Barranquilla (Colombia), which had been characterized as comprised of low achievers. Interestingly, the study shows the opportunities those students have to get familiar with and comprehend academic texts provided they are given the chance to be aware of their structure. The author also stresses that students reach comprehension of texts if they are shown which reading strategies are appropriate for each genre and how they can be exploited to meet established goals.

We close the first section of this edition with an article dealing with EFL in public schools in Mexico. In this work, Nora M. Basurto Santos and Jolene R. Gregory Weathers compare the results of two studies that looked at what is happening in practice from the teachers’ perspectives. Although data collection processes were carried out in very similar contexts with a ten-year-gap between them, both studies indicate that there seems not to be any changes that could enhance the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language in those schools.

The second section, Reports on Pedagogical Experiences, includes two works by Colombian teachers. In the first one, Lizmendy Zuhey Bautista Urrego and Ingrid Judith Parra Toro inform us about EFL students’ construction of perceptions on social issues found in famous works of art when engaged in the practice of critical thinking as a strategy to appreciate art that expressed social matters. The pedagogical intervention took place in a conversational club organised in a public school and let the researchers unveil participants’ perceptions of works of art while interacting in the English language.

The influence of peer-assessment and the use of corpus for the development of speaking skills in in-service teachers is the topic of Mary Mily Gómez Sará’s article. Video recordings, two peer-assessment forms, and a teacher’s journal led to the identification of three enhancement strategies (willingness to improve, use of compensatory strategies, and construction of a personalized version of the corpus) and two detrimental traits (underassessment and dependency on the corpus). As can be observed in this work, more studies should be conducted to understand the learning processes of pre and in-service teachers. This way, we may more effectively contribute to their professional development.

The third section, Reflections and Revision of Themes, presents a contribution by Sthephanny Moncada Linares, who invites us to enhance critical cultural awareness in the language classroom as well as to decenter language learners’ conceptions and practices of “othering” against the target culture. The author draws on key literature that can help us understand the notion of “othering” and its pedagogical possibilities to promote critical cultural awareness raising. She also presents some theoretical contributions on the concepts of the “Other” and the “Self” and its dialectical relation, and suggests some pedagogical tools to attain that goal.

The HOW journal and ASOCOPI very much hope you find this new edition interesting and useful. We remind our readership that we are a publication by and for teachers of English who wish to share outcomes of educational and research experiences intended to add understanding to English language teaching practices. Do not miss the chance to get your work published and to contribute to the development of our professional field!

Melba Libia Cárdenas
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Bogotá
Guest Editor