Resumen de Conflicting views on language policy and planning at a Colombian university

Norbella Miranda, Martha Berdugo, Harvey Tejada

• The current internationalization trends in higher education and educational language policies impel universities to plan their provision of foreign languages. Often, universities are developing language policies, redesigning their foreign language programs and seeking to foster bilingual or multilingual strategies within graduate and undergraduate programs in order to respond to these trends and to students’ new needs for a solid education in an increasingly interconnected world. Drawing on Johnson’s heuristics of language policy analysis [Johnson, D. C. (2009). Ethnography of language policy. Language Policy, 8, 139–159], this paper will share how explicit as well as implicit policy is being created by different agents at the largest state-funded higher education institution in the southwestern region of Colombia. The paper will then locate the initiatives for the teaching and learning of English and other foreign languages within the discourses that circulate around English as lingua franca, academica and economica. It will contend that although the goals for foreign language learning as a requisite for the internationalization of the University are shared by different policy agents, the ways to approach these goals represent different and often conflicting views on micro policy and planning.