“I Didn't Know There Were So Many Ways to Speak English”: Developing Global Englishes Awareness Among Colombian Secondary School Students

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia (UPTC), Colombia

10.30466/ijltr.2026.57670.3489

Abstract

This qualitative study examines what happened when Global Englishes (GE)–informed pedagogy was brought into a public secondary school in Boyacá, Colombia, and how it shaped students’ understandings of English. Working within an interpretivist paradigm and borrowing elements from action research and classroom-based research, we taught six GE-informed sessions to 17 tenth-grade students in the school’s English major. Data came from an entry survey (ES), students’ reflections (SRs), and focus group discussions (FGDs), and were analyzed through bottom-up qualitative content analysis. At the start, most participants tied English to Inner Circle countries and to native-speaker norms. After the sessions, they spoke of English as a global language, recognized more of its diversity, and began to talk about ownership of English as something shared. These newer views did not replace the older ones, though. They sat alongside beliefs about correctness and about the need for a stable reference variety that students had picked up over years of schooling. GE-informed pedagogy, we argue, can open space for critical awareness of English as a global resource, but the change it produces in learners’ language ideologies is slow, uneven, and at times contradictory.

Keywords

Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research
Volume 14, 3 (Special Issue)
November 2026
Pages 1-21

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History

  • Receive Date: 28 September 2026
  • Accept Date: 21 October 2026

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