Tertiary StudentsVoices on EFL Learning with a Learner-Centered Approach: a Dialogic Endeavor

Abstract

In the last few decades, Mexican public universities have experienced an increase in enrollments of students, seeking academic degrees in order to achieve both academic and professional goals and to meet the labor market’s current needs. Parallel to their disciplinary courses, most students are expected to learn English as a Foreign Language (EFL). However, many EFL learning programs worldwide are still anchored in traditional learning patterns, and Mexican public universities are no exception. Typically, they offer students general English courses with hierarchical classroom dynamics based on a teacher-student transmission paradigm which has yielded mostly poor results (Davies, 2011). On these grounds, a disciplinary EFL learning course was designed in the Division of Economic and Administrative Sciences at the University of Guanajuato (UG DCEA), intended to foster a dialogic approach to EFL learning based on Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia (1981), according to which all language is shaped by a variety of simultaneously speaking voices. It invited students to negotiate and shape its structure according to their fields of expertise and areas of interest, but considered classroom negotiation as a gradual process in order for students to discover, experience and recognize the value of negotiation and become accustomed to it. Further elements such as a learning modality that required learners to assume a relatively high degree of learner autonomy and a more democratic path towards assessment, including self- and peer grading on student learning, contributed to the creation of a learnercentered classroom setting that both embraced and challenged student engagement and collaboration.