State of the Art in Understanding Social Contexts in EFL Education

Abstract

The objective of this state of the art is to create a database that provides the LLEI students with a means to focus and carry out their research projects under the guidelines of the Subproject 3, based on already existing research in the field of understanding the role of the sociocultural context in education. This work was developed following the principles presented by Reardon (2006) in which the author proposes the most relevant aspects to consider in a literature review as a resource to understand an object of study. The first step of the procedure was to gather relevant sources guided by keywords to then examine the contents using a format, adapted from Reardon’s proposal, to organize the main information of each item and the critical analysis done by the researcher, which enabled the identification of particular characteristics of the contexts studied to present the findings and conclusions. At the end of the process, four main themes emerged as the result of the analysis of the plethora of the articles studied: discrepancies between educational policies and their implementation; lack of research in rural contexts; the need for training of language teachers, and the perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes of teachers and learners regarding their experiences in the process of teaching-learning a foreign language.