Social Representations of English in University Students in Southern Colombia

Abstract

This article derives from a doctoral research project focused on the Social Representations of English as a second language (L2) among university students from two Higher Education Institutions in the department of Nariño, Colombia. Despite institutional efforts to strengthen English language teaching, many students still face challenges that reveal
gaps in motivation, language appropriation, and the development of communicative competencies. This situation
makes it necessary to examine the social and cultural factors that shape students’ relationship with English beyond academic or linguistic dimensions. The study aims to analyze how social representations of English are constructed
and how beliefs and anchoring processes are related to language learning. It is framed within the sociological perspective of Moscovici’s Social Representations Theory (1979), while also adopting an emergent research paradigm with a processual approach (Banchs, 2000), which enables an  understanding of how such representations are created,
transformed, and sustained over time. Data collection techniques included interviews, focus groups, observations, and life stories, applied to students from three academic programs belonging to the faculties of Health Sciences, Accounting Sciences, and Humanities. The findings are expected to provide valuable insights into the challenges students face in
the classroom and to serve as a basis for rethinking pedagogical strategies from a more contextualized perspective.