4

Editorial 
Carlo Granados-Beltrán*

We are pleased to present a new edition of this journal. It is evident that new times bring new challenges and the educational field is not the exception. For this issue, four of 
the researchers approached topics connected to one of the 21st century 
skills, named initiative and self-direction (Trilling & Fadel, 2009); 
these skills imply student’s capacity to set up attainable goals, to 
monitor and organize tasks according to priority, to be a self-directed 
learner, and to show commitment to life-long learning, among other 
skills. Our first contribution, by Ramírez, explored through action 
research ways to promote autonomy in university students, within an 
English course.  Secondly, García & Durán present an inquiry about 
the influence students’ learning experiences have on their perception 
as learners – or self-efficacy – and how they contributed to their 
reluctant attitudes towards the learning of English. In this same line, 
but focusing more, on the 21st century skill related to teachers and 
learning to create together, is Carreño & Hernández’s contribution 
about co-planning and its implications for teachers’ practices and their 
professional development. 

The second set of articles is linked to specific features emerging 
from language skill work. García-Ponce & Mora-Pablo, from 
Mexico, focused on the ways in which the beliefs about providing 
corrective feedback when students engage in oral interaction in a 
foreign language. Additionally, Fallas & Chaves also decided to go 
beyond the matters of unity, coherence, cohesion and accurate syntax to 
approach the issue of students’ authorial voice when writing academic 
texts. Coates, Gorham & Nicholas, in Italy, proposed the application 
of phonics instruction to particular phoneme/grapheme decoding, and 
therefore, second language learning. Last but not least, and responding 
to the need of delving into the ways in which the postmethod pedagogy 
(Kumaravadivelu, 1994, 2001) can be put into practice in the local 
contexts, Bautista’s study aimed to characterize the development of 
socio-cultural awareness in an EFL university classroom.  

                No. 15 (July - December, 2017)     No. 15 (July - December, 2017)



5

We at GiST Journal hope our reader will find in our contributors’ 
articles not only practical application for their own classroom context, 
but also a source of inspiration to share their research endeavours in 
their classrooms and institutions so that we could continue building a 
community of learning in the fields of bilingual education and language 
teaching. 

References

Kumaravadivelu, B. (1994). The Postmethod Condition: (E)merging 
Strategies for Second/Foreign Language Teaching. TESOL 
Quarterly, 28(1), 27 – 48 

Kumaravadivelu, B. (2001). Toward a postmethod pedagogy. TESOL 
Quarterly, 35(4), 537 – 560

Trilling, B. & Fadel, C. (2009). 21st Century Skills. Learning for life in 
our times. San Francisco: Jossey – Bass. 

*Carlo Granados-Beltrán holds an MA in British Cultural 
Studies and ELT from the University of Warwick and an MA 
in Applied Linguistics to TEFL from Universidad Distrital. 
Currently, he is doing a PhD in Education at Universidad 
Santo Tomás. He is a teacher researcher at the BA in Bilingual 
Education at ÚNICA. He has been teacher of the Language 
Department at Universidad Central, the BA programmes in 
Spanish and Languages and Spanish and English at Universidad 
Pedagógica Nacional and the BA in Modern Languages at 
Universidad Javeriana. Also, he has been guest lecturer for the 
MA in Language Teaching at UPTC.

                No. 15 (July - December, 2017)     No. 15 (July - December, 2017)