Language education and multilingualism in Colombia: crossing the divide

ABSTRACTDespite Colombia´s official recognition of its ethnic and cultural diversity, it has yet to develop in practice an inclusive educational vision involving the recognition of diversity, as well as promoting the country´s insertion within the global market. Garcia et al. acknowledge the importance of ‘cultivating’ students’ diverse languages and cultural resources and their use as teaching languages has been recognized. In this paper, based on a meta-analysis of four case studies, I argue that the official Ethno-education and National English Programme policies need to be rethought as an inclusive National Language Education Policy, in order to enable speakers of ethnic community languages and speakers of Portuguese in border areas to have access to appropriate teaching and learning opportunities in other languages available in the local language ecology, in addition to providing for international language speakers who wish to learn an Indigenous language to enrich their intercultural and cognitive e...