Aims

In this article, I synthesize the available EFL studies undertaken in high school settings using a critical interpretive synthesis (CIS; Gough et al., 2012). Further research in this area would help position high schools as a pivot for inquiry to shape further explorations. I hope with this CIS to help depict more thoroughly what happens in Chilean high-school EFL classrooms. The aims of this article are:

1. to map the broader English language education research landscape in Chile.

2. to generate a critical interpretive synthesis of the evidence obtained from high-school research accounts.

Stages of the Corpus Construction Process

The corpus analyzed is the result of a two-year review and systematization of literature I conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation. I proceeded in three stages: first, the identification of studies; second, the mapping of research areas in the corpus; and third, the organization of high-school studies to perform a closer examination. I provide a two-layered characterization based on the studies collected: breadth (in a broad research landscape in less detail) and depth (in a narrow landscape in higher detail). The process of data collection, and the stages of organization and analysis are depicted in Figure 1, which I will explain in the subsequent sections.

Figure 1: Process of Collection, Organization, and Selection of High School Based Studies

Stage 2: Mapping the Broader Research Landscape

The second stage of this corpus construction consisted of mapping the collected documents, recording their date and area of study. At this stage, I did not intend to elicit important details or theoretical nuances, but simply to identify their general information to outline clusters of similar studies. I defined the initial sampling criterion by adapting Hawker et al.’s (2002) analytical framework, which I display in Figure 2. I pre-defined categories that later resulted in the definition of the broader areas of research interest. The initial strategy to set a preliminary order was the publication year. The chronological organization enormously facilitated the snowball search to trace further references. The assessment form was used to characterize the studies. This organization quickly yielded a more refined delineation of boundaries among the different EFL research areas. Table 2, which is provided later in this paper, offers detailed results.

Figure 2: Assessment Form Stages 1-2

Note. Adapted from Hawker et al.’s (2002) analytical framework.

Stage 3: The Narrow Research Landscape Construction

Once I organized the broad landscape clusters, the school studies cluster was thoroughly reviewed. The number of micro corpus studies found (n = 42) was more straightforward to arrange, given its lower quantity than other larger clusters. In this stage, the identification of the focal studies required a third criterion to identify their locus. The studies locus allowed identifying three settings: primary, secondary, and mixed educational settings. After compartmentalizing the total number of high-school studies, a similar process was used to organize the broader landscape: chronological organization and the analysis of structural components. In Figure 3, I present the criteria used. Additionally, the analysis in this stage required several rounds of coding, including holistic, pattern, and theoretical coding (Saldaña, 2009) to review the studies’ findings.

Figure 3: Assessment Form Stage 3

The Broader Landscape

The final scrutinized corpus resulted in 272 documents. Of the total 298 documents that were found (which included all kinds of publications), only 26 were discarded because they did not comply with the primary selection criterion (i.e., type of publication). Additionally, their sources and purpose differed significantly with research accounts and format, such as PowerPoint presentations, book reviews, editorials, essays, ELT magazine articles, agency reports, and dissertations.

The spread shown in Figure 4 is the outcome of Stages 1 (the search) and 2 (the mapping). The spread shows the available online published English language research collected, ranging from 1942 to 2020. The numbers included in the bars represent the number of indexed publications, books, and book chapters. The findings show a gradually increasing production of scientific work in the field. This growth in publication coincides with other macro reports on research in Latin America, which also show a similar systematic expansion (Guzmán-Valenzuela & Barnett, 2019).

Figure 4: Spread of the Analysed EFL Research 1942-2020

Although the EFL Chilean research production is not extensive in terms of quantity, it has sustained a steady growth. The most preferred publication formats identified are the article, followed by the edited book chapter contribution, and finally, books. The average number of publications is 10 per year. In Table 1, I present the publication preference distribution.

Eight thematic areas were identified in the corpus. In Table 2, I have mapped a broad summary of Stage 2 assessment, which consisted of categorizing areas with a focus on research interest and a thematic emphasis description. These areas served to configure the map of the nature of inquiry in the broadest Chilean ELT field. For this paper’s purpose, I only focus on the cluster related to high schools. I present this broader data set to underpin some claims later in this paper. However, I would like to draw attention to some of the points found at this synthesis stage. It is important to note that over 65% of the research has been conducted within the boundaries of teacher education programmes at universities, including Area 1, ELT teacher education, 2, teaching methodology, and 4, applied linguistics. In the case of the applied linguistic area, 89.5% of the inquiry was undertaken in undergraduate programmes. These results frame the inquiry agenda in the Chilean context as teacher-education centred. These results frame many of the findings I discuss in the following sections concerning the high school studies.

The Narrow Landscape: EFL High-School Studies

One of the readily observable characteristics of the general EFL school research-with primary, mixed levels, and secondary considered all together-is its limited number. The school cluster is divided into three subareas: primary education (n = 16, 38.1%), high school education (n = 23, 54.8%) and mixed accounts (n = 3, 7.1%). The mixed accounts’ findings were not always distinctive in relation to either the type of school (e.g., public-private) or the (sometimes mixed) teaching level (primary, secondary, university, and language institute). As such, these findings were discarded. In Figure 5, I contrast the available broad landscape and the EFL high school proportions per year.

Figure 5: Stacked Contrast Between EFL Broader and School Research Accumulation

The nature of EFL research conducted in high-school settings differs in many aspects. This variability involved a more detailed analysis of its thematic variability, contexts, choice of methods, procedures, and theoretical framing. In Table 3, I display the Stage 3 final corpus of high school studies search. Together they provide findings that help us visualize the little variability of foci, regardless of their diverse nature, centred mostly on teachers, teaching, and to a lesser extent, on the students. Most of these studies relate to action-oriented and decision-making challenges that teachers regularly face in their classrooms, addressed from their perspectives.

The research traditions are well balanced among the EFL high-school studies, as presented in Table 4. Several reflections emerge from this panoptic review of the research on secondary school realities. I have summarised the studies following the research traditions to reach a holistic synthesis of the research findings. I begin this report addressing the mixed methods tradition (n = 5), followed by quantitative (n = 7), and I conclude with the qualitative (n = 7) contributions, which include non-empirical works (n = 2) that do not make explicit their orientation, yet they can be allocated in this group. Then, I continue with a critical synthesis of findings.

First, the mixed-methods studies have been relatively continual across time. Their findings are diverse, holistic, and speak primarily about how EFL pedagogy is implemented. They provide evidence on teaching conditions in high-school settings and the relations between practices and the beliefs that inform those practices. A recurrent theme in nearly all the studies examined is the dissonance between teachers’ practices, belief systems, and discourses. In these reports, teachers’ identities are reported as constant-struggling selves that strive within constrained spaces-schools and classrooms-ruled by tensions and contradictions and inconsistencies. These studies have provided evidence drawing on teachers’ discourses, beliefs, and practices (De la Barra van Treek, 2016; Díaz et al., 2010; Díaz et al., 2012; Glas, 2013; Sato & Oyanedel, 2020). Additionally, these studies consistently suggest the gap between school reality and teacher training as an unattended issue (Díaz et al., 2012; Sato & Oyadenel, 2020). They report how teacher training programmes do not link the schools with their sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts. These contradictions have also been reported elsewhere in teacher education settings and policy analysis studies (see Lizasoain, 2017; and Martin & Rosas-Maldonado, 2019, for further discussions). Certainly, this misalignment is an important issue for future research.

The Chilean quantitative studies stand out in their large sampling techniques in relation to the other approaches. They have been relevant for generating more and farther-reaching synchronous portraits of the Chilean high school EFL population. High-school EFL quantitative inquiry is generally bounded to the pedagogical outcomes and linguistic performance in the English class. To some degree, these studies also map classrooms and schools demographically, that is, who those people are. An interesting aspect of these studies is that most of them are focused exclusively on the students.

The quantitative findings, and subsequent discussions, establish a strong correspondence between an EFL pedagogy and the surrounding immediacy of the socioeconomic and sociocultural spaces in which students learn English (Kormos & Kiddle, 2013). For instance, Walczak et al. (2017) report that the socioeconomic background is a “strong predictor of language attainment” (p. 64), raising concerns to look at classrooms and their challenges embedded in particular socioeconomic conditions (e.g., private and public settings) and geographical (e.g., urban and rural) contexts. Nevertheless, these studies’ contributions are descriptive in their nature. The impracticality of complementary narrative inquiry prevents us from understanding the causality of such characterizations. Other studies in this approach focus on pedagogical dynamics (Díaz et al., 2011; Walper, 2019) and linguistic factors (Cancino & Díaz, 2020; Cárcamo, 2020).

Qualitative inquiry has zeroed in the tensions among the high school system and the members’ professional relationships and a comprehensive gaze on the particularities of the contexts, focusing on interaction between teachers and students. These studies also examine the pedagogical relations among the development of teaching skills, the mediating instruments (e.g., textbooks), and the socio-cognitive foundations of these groups’ interactions. Some of these works provide compelling findings. For example, in Díaz et al. (2012), teachers’ identity tensions are explored. Teachers are reported as dealing with the tensions between being either educators or linguists as separate components of their professional identities. In a similar tone, and in more depth, Glas (2013) provides an analysis of the professional views of teachers who experience tensions and negotiate with their social spaces, beliefs, disciplinary knowledge, socioeconomic conditions, and material support, which create a sensation of powerlessness. As in the mixed methods studies, teachers are similarly described as holding inconsistencies between their discursive repertoires, pedagogical actions, and beliefs. An overriding characteristic reported is that communicative language teaching underpinnings dominate their teaching discourses but not their teaching practices (De la Barra van Treek, 2016; Díaz et al., 2010, Díaz et al., 2015). These inconsistencies are suggested to be contextually and personally constrained.

CIS Outcomes: Mapping Fields of Inquiry

The map of inquiry fields, shown in Figure 6, results from the thematically synthetic constructs emerging from the research findings’ codification nodes and their connections. Subsequently, the synthetic constructs and the studies’ interpretation were combined, producing specific topics that led towards larger theoretical clusters. The three distinct fields of inquiry identified were (a) the outer, (b) the liminal, and (c) the inner. The conceptualization I used emerged from the data during the analysis, that is, I have not used predefined conceptualization to interpret or classify the data. These three fields are configured within a continuum that ranges from themes rooted in structural-functional views to more phenomenological perspectives of EFL education. Their boundaries are well-defined. For example, teachers’ classroom management research findings are rarely associated with social dynamics or issues of power dynamics in the classrooms but to practical methodological concerns.

Figure 6: Fields of Inquiry Map in High School EFL Education

First, the outer field considers aspects of the sociopolitical world (Lo Bianco, 2008). This inquiry field is the least represented, and it consists of all the broader sociopolitical research areas that inscribe the normative, cultural, ideological, and social parameters, determining value systems and material and symbolic conditions in relation to EFL education. The findings reported in this field, as in Farías and Radu (2019) and Walczak et al. (2017), point to the correspondence between social class and language attainment opportunities and the sets of values that sustain the relations with English as a world dominant language. Nevertheless, EFL education is generally presented as detached from its sociohistorical conditions.

Next is the liminal field of inquiry. This field encompasses those intermediate spaces in which relationships between the broader sociopolitical landscape and the school members operate. This field includes the connections between youth learning experiences and their immediate sociocultural environments (e.g., students’ family sociocultural backgrounds). One key concept in this field (and also mentioned in the other two fields studies) is access, which seems to be a recurrent metonymy that needs careful unpacking and cautious exploration.

A better understanding may lead to deeper comprehension of issues related to discourses that justify and sustain segregation, inequality, vulnerability, and learning attainment failure (De la Barra & Carbone, 2020; Glas, 2008; Gómez & Pérez, 2015; Kormos & Kiddle, 2013; Walczak et al., 2017). English enjoys high social value, which sustains English as a desired “tool” across all the socioeconomic groups in our society (Glas, 2008). Consequently, the “access to better opportunities” that the English language grants is reported as being construal in a way that shapes identity, world visions, and expected (socio)economic paths (Glas, 2008; Kormos & Kiddle, 2013; Kruglanski & Higgins, 2007; Matear, 2008).

The third and last field of inquiry, the inner field, includes three clusters: EFL discipline, teacher cognition, and artifacts. They narrow the focus on the instrumental aspect of teaching, that is, teaching methods and strategies, classroom management, use of materials, quality of teaching delivery, and students’ engagement (Correa et al., 2017; Saavedra & Brauchy, 2017; Walper, 2019). They also incorporate various aspects of dynamics involving interaction, negotiation, decision making, resistance, and change (Farías & Radu, 2019; Gómez & Pérez, 2015). At the core of this field, there is a clear focus on subjects, particularly on the teachers. Issues revolve around characterizing their cognitions: who these teachers are, how they think, how they perform, and what instruments they implement to reach their aims (Cárcamo, 2020; Díaz et al., 2010; Walper, 2019). As a secondary subject, we can find some discrete descriptions about students, mostly characterized and reported through psychometric scales, as in Gómez and Pérez (2015).

In relation to the formal aspects of high-school research, the CIS, and in particular three fields’ sum of evidence, signals prosperous directions regarding new research methods, design and opportunities to be revisited, hoping that they may trigger further critical research on issues relevant to the schools. The overall characterization shows that:

1. Research on high-school EFL education is recent (2010-2020) and scant.

2. Studies vary widely in depth, scope, complexity, and reflection.

3. Research about EFL education undertaken in high school is teacher-centred.

4. Research design is consistently balanced among the three traditions (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed).

5. The contextualization of the studies is oftentimes unclear and brief.

6. None of the studies reviewed uses participatory methods or polyvocal designs.

The final outcomes of this critical interpretive synthesis of the Chilean high-school EFL research in the synthesis below, contains the interpretative portion, and as such, I provide the new configuration of the findings in the studies discussed, which suggest that:

1. The conditions and dispositions in EFL education have changed very little in ten years.

2. The communities’ socioeconomic conditions are a powerful force that profoundly constrains teachers’ decisions, students’ fate, and the school structures in terms of control and power-share. Teachers struggle with these underlying socioeconomic forces, which seem to cause their disassociation between their practices, beliefs, and discourses, thus affecting their imaginaries and pedagogical expectations.

3. EFL teachers are little prepared to understand and contest socioeconomic condition forces. Consequently, they readily resort to behaviorist teaching methods as a form of control, and seemingly, as professional validation mechanisms.

4. A factor underlying part of this dissonance is the lack of updated disciplinary knowledge, still rooted in the earlier stages of the communicative approach merged with elements of grammar-centred/translation teaching.

5. Secondary students’ perceptions are characterized as contradictory. Students’ motivation is generally low, yet their attitude towards EFL education is positive and favorable. Although they acknowledge the relevance of the English language in their future careers and lives, they exert little effort in learning. This may be the result of an (EFL) educational system that struggles with inconsistencies.

6. Supporting materials for the EFL class, in particular textbooks, need better alignment with the diverse educational realities and needs of the country.

In the following section, I will discuss some considerations I deem relevant in relation to these synthesis findings and the Chilean EFL contextual particularities to finally conclude with a reflection.