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Editorial 
Carlo Granados-Beltrán*

We are pleased to present this new issue of the Education and Learning Research Journal – GiST. This edition covers three main topics: the impact of English in a content class, the 
knowledges and competences required for pre-service language teachers, 
and the pedagogical uses of technological devices to foster skills. Our 
first contribution by Maíz, from Spain, describes how university lectures 
can take a different shape in terms of the type of questions posed when 
using English as a medium of instruction, instead of Spanish. For 
bilingual contexts, this study is really useful at underlining how teachers 
and students’ use of questions varies depending on the language used 
for instruction. 

The second topic concerning the articles, initial teacher education, 
is a key element in the advancement of the countries, since teachers 
are the ones who help to cultivate new generations of subjects able to 
respond to the increasing demands of society, such as the development 
of informed citizenship, the adaptation to multilingual and multicultural 
societies, and the talent to take advantage of an ever-changing 
technological world. Therefore, many professors in initial language 
education programmes are inquiring about the body of knowledge that 
might compose the education of pre-service teachers. 

Arias-Cepeda and Rojas delve into Linguistics as one of the 
foundational disciplines of Foreign Language Teaching, but whose 
didactics has not been frequently explored. Therefore, they share 
some partial results of a study aiming to re-interpret the role of this 
discipline in the curriculum of a Bilingual Education Programme and 
the advantages it could offer to future English teachers. 

Another concern in relation to teacher education is the way in 
which we can foster research competences. In this line of thought, 
Camacho looks into French theory, specifically Deleuze and Guattari’s 
Logic of Sense and their notions of experimentation, in combination 
with inquiry-learning, to support research and argumentation skills to 
further the construction of teachers as transformative intellectuals.  

Burgin and Daniel also approach a common subject of 
interest for teacher educators, which is how to address multilingual 
and multicultural contexts, in this case, represented by indigenous 

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communities in Ecuador. This study exemplifies the emergent interest in 
Latin American countries in how to promote local practices in relation to 
foreign language teaching which better respond to contextual educational 
needs. 

Becoming a transformative intellectual who inquires about ways to 
respond to local needs also implies being able to communicate research 
findings to local and international academic communities, action which 
is mostly done through academic writing. Therefore, Marulanda 
and Martínez decided to take a multi-strategy integrated approach to 
strengthen this skill with a group of pre-service teachers. 

To close with this common thread of language teacher education, 
Bautista shares a review of Kumaravadivelu’s key work Understanding 
Language Teaching. From Method to Postmethod, which has been 
paramount in encouraging new language pedagogies aiming to identify 
and respond to local needs, to foster the professionalization of language 
teaching – instead of its categorization as art and craft –; and to analyse 
how wider educational issues, such as political, economic and social 
phenomena impinge on language teaching.

Finally, two of the articles in this issue demonstrate how professors 
are trying to make the most of technological tools by combining them with 
a pedagogical basis. This is the case of Devia and García who explored 
podcasting along with collaborative learning to promote oral skills in a 
group of tenth graders from a public school. Also, Celis, Onatra and 
Zubieta decided to use educational videos in combination with affective 
learning to help vocabulary learning in a group of fifth graders. 

It is our hope that this edition serves to encourage fellow members 
in the educational community to share results of their projects and to 
bring about new research that helps to strengthen our network and to 
contribute to the work being done in schools and universities. 

*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. 14 (January - June 2017)     No. 14 (January - June 2017)