Discussions about primary teacher training language policy in Colombia

Abstract

In recent decades in Colombia, low English scores on standardized tests have been attributed to teachers. However, language policies should be reviewed to determine their impact on educational institutions. For this reason, an exploratory systematic review was carried out with the objective of seeking references in relation to the impact of the National Bilingualism Plan (PNB) and the reflections and contributions of the authors on the initial training of primary school teachers for bilingualism in Colombia. This review is a partial result of the doctoral thesis "Interpretation and appropriation of the national linguistic policy in a Teacher Training College. Towards a policy for multilingualism". As a methodology, PRISMA (Page et al., 2020) was implemented, taking into account two categories: National and international studies on bilingualism policy and reflections and contributions on initial teacher training for bilingualism.The final corpus of this review was 53 documents, which show the low impact of the PNB, by imposing a decontextualized curriculum that contributes to the stratification and commodification of languages and the lack of teacher qualification. It can be concluded that the formulation of language policies is required, beyond simple plans, projects or programs, that break the scheme of their construction from the up-bottom to the bottom-up, in a structured, contextualized, democratic and inclusive manner, and that allows transcending to an education for multilingualism.