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The Enactment of the Colombian National Bilingual Program: Equal Access to Language Capital?
La implementación del Programa Nacional de Bilingüismo en Colombia: ¿acceso igualitario a capital lingüístico?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15446/profile.v25n2.103003Keywords:
Colombia, educational equality, English as a foreign language, language capital, language policy, policy enactment (en)capital lingüístico, Colombia, igualdad educativa, inglés como lengua extranjera, política lingüística, promulgación de políticas (es)
Drawing upon Bourdieu’s concept of capital, this article examines the enactment of the Programa Nacional de Bilingüismo (National Bilingual Program), a policy that aims to provide Colombian students equal opportunities to learn English. In this exploratory, sequential mixed-methods study, data were collected from teachers and students from three Grade 5 classrooms of public schools in Colombia. The findings revealed that the plan’s differentiated enactment generates unequal access to opportunities to build language capital and unequal levels of academic language achievement among the three schools. We argue that the enactment of the plan to equalize opportunities and achievement and therefore build the language capital of Colombian students is obstructed by existing funding structures.
Basándose en el concepto de capital de Bourdieu, este artículo de investigación exploratoria, secuencial y mixta examina la implementación del Programa Nacional de Bilingüismo, una política que tiene como objetivo brindar a los estudiantes colombianos oportunidades igualitarias para aprender inglés. Los datos se recolectaron en tres aulas de grado quinto de tres escuelas públicas colombianas. Los hallazgos revelaron que la implementación diferenciada del programa implica un acceso desigual a oportunidades de construir capital lingüístico y niveles desiguales de logros académicos entre las tres escuelas. La implementación del programa para proveer igualdad de oportunidades y logros para construir el capital lingüístico de los estudiantes colombianos se ve obstaculizada por las estructuras de financiamiento actuales.
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1. Carmelina Encarnación Mosquera, Adriana Idrobo Hurtado. (2025). Needs of Graduates of the Modern Languages Program of a University in Colombia. Lenguaje, 53(2), p.e20714819. https://doi.org/10.25100/lenguaje.v53i2.14819.
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Copyright (c) 2023 Diego Cardona-Escobar, Melissa Barnes, Marc Pruyn
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