Born in France and partly raised in Germany and France, today’s guest blogger, Colette Despagne, earned her MA in French as a Foreign Language from the Université du Mans in France and her PhD at Western University in Canada. Since 2015, she has been an Assistant Professor at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico. Colette is very interested in the connection between language, power and identity in postcolonial contexts like Mexico where she has lived for 27 years. Her current research interests focus on plurilingual education for return migrants from the United States to Mexico and on intercultural education in Latin America. She has published in several international journals and recently published a book with Routledge entitled Decolonizing language, decolonizing research.        

My book is the result of a long journey between Mexico and Canada which began in 2003 when I first entered to work at a private university in Puebla, Mexico as the head of the language department. Together with a new team of language teachers of several so called “international” languages, we rebuilt the whole department by following the Common European Reference Framework (CEFR) guidelines for language teaching and learning. It was an inspiring and challenging work for all of us during several years and seemed to give good results for most of the students at that time.

However, one group of students came to see me several times and told me that the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) class was the most difficult subject for them. They were afraid to not obtain the 500 TOEFL points they were required to so they could graduate. These students were all offered scholarship at the university because they all came from very impoverished rural communities in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, a central state in Mexico.

Continue reading →