Didáctica

Towards a Pedagogy of Possibilities: Critical Literacy through Literature in ELTEd

María Isabel Arriaga *
Miriam Patricia Germani **
Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, Argentina

Resumen Presentamos en este artículo una experiencia pedagógica de literacidad crítica en el contexto de la enseñanza de la literatura en la formación docente en inglés. La literacidad crítica intenta formar lectores activos y capaces de transformar la recepción pasiva del texto en habilidad para cuestionar las relaciones de poder presentes en toda la acción humana. Describimos aquí una serie de actividades tendientes a integrar análisis literario y literacidad crítica, y narramos el modo en que conducimos nuestras clases y guiamos las discusiones de nuestros estudiantes. Evaluamos finalmente nuestra propuesta en pos de mejorar nuestra práctica y trabajar realmente por una pedagogía de las posibilidades.

Summary In this article, we report a pedagogical experience with critical literacy in the context of literature teaching in English Language Teacher Education. Critical literacy aims at developing active readers able to move beyond the passive acceptance of the text to question the power relations underlying all human action. We describe a series of activities intended to integrate literary analysis with critical literacy, and we narrate briefly the way in which we conducted the classes and guided our students’ discussions. We also assess the results of our experience from both our own and our students’ perspectives in an attempt to improve our practice and make it work towards a pedagogy of possibilities.

Palabras clave Enseñanza de inglés, enseñanza de la literatura, formación docente, literacidad crítica.

Keywords Critical literacy, ELT, literature teaching, teacher education.

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In this article we share experiences designed to foster critical literacy at the English Language Teacher Education (ELTEd) program at Universidad Nacional de La Pampa (UNLPam), Argentina, in the context of the teaching and research project Critical literacy and literature in English language teacher education (Basabe & Germani, 2013). A critical literacy proposal demands that the literary text, as well as any other text, be explored from a perspective that does not only reveal its linguistic features and the socio-cultural context of its production but also how the text relates to the readers and their context of reception. Thus, we expect to modify the way our students and we, teacher educators, approach the literary text, so that we move from a cultural approach to the study of literature to one of personal growth and critical learning. Here, we report on the design and implementation of three activities based on a narrative, a poetic, and a dramatic text and, following the tenets of critical literacy, we assess the results of our experiences from both our and our students’ perspectives1.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

From Traditional Reading to Critical Literacy

Reading has always been central to English Language Teaching (ELT). However, our conception of what the action of reading actually involves has changed over time, and we can claim to be witnessing a shift in paradigms in the way we approach the written text. In a seminar held in Brasilia, Brazil, in 2006, a group of Latin American English language teacher educators (Critical Literacy Winter School, 2006) summarized the key issues sustained by different approaches to reading as follows:  

1. Traditional reading focuses on decoding the truth-value of a text and the authority and legitimacy of its writer in order to develop a correct comprehension of its content. Language is seen as fixed and transparent, and knowledge is considered to be universal, cumulative, and linear.
2. Critical reading focuses on the interpretation of the text in order to develop critical reflexion, understood as the ability to decode the intentions of its context of production. Critical reading also perceives language as a translation of reality, but it regards knowledge as only plausible interpretations of it, framed and even constructed within our minds.
3. Critical literacy, on the other hand, focuses on the production of knowledge, the role of power in interpretation, and issues of representation and their implications. Through constant questioning, it aims at developing reflection as the ability to trace assumptions within the written text. Language becomes ideological and a means to create reality; knowledge is always partial, complex, dynamic, and dependent on context.

Associated to the work of Paulo Freire (2009/1970, 1983), critical literacy aims at developing readers who are active participants in the process of reading and who are able to move beyond the passive acceptance of the text to question, examine, or dispute the power relations that exist between readers and writers. Critical competence implies that the students “critically analyse and transform the texts by acting on knowledge that texts are not ideologically natural or neutral – that they represent particular points of view while silencing others” (Luke & Freebody, 1999, quoted in Macedo & Steinberg, 2007: 9). Our project then aimed at developing critical literacy through the study of literary texts in the context of ELTed. We would do that by having our students explore multiple perspectives and imagine those that could have been absent or silenced and by having them examine social relations - particularly those that comprised differences in power - and defy the values and presuppositions involved in the production and reception of any written text.

Critical Literacy in the Americas

Experiences of critical literacy have been designed and implemented in diverse contexts by English language teacher educators across the Americas. Based on interviews and observations, Gomes Wielewicki (2007) analyzed the way in which Art students produced meanings through the reading of literature in English in Brazil, and she examined how the students’ institutional histories became survival strategies at university. Her findings showed that students tended to agree with the teachers and that sometimes they felt demotivated due to the power and knowledge differences between both educational actors. The aim of a critical education should be then to encourage students to recognise their own power as a source of agency to transform knowledge into actions intended to change reality. In the Latino context of the USA, Rodríguez (2008) implemented the creative reading of culturally relevant literature in the teaching of English as a foreign language. Consequently, she developed the concept of “critical biliteracy” (157) in order to explain the students’ becoming aware of their linguistic possibilities both in their familial context and in the competitive English-speaking world. This experience concurred with Gomes Wielewicki (2007) in that critical literacy can be a vehicle in the growth of students’ awareness of their power for social transformation.

Based on an experience of critical literacy in the teaching of English as a foreign language at university level in Brazil, Machado de Almeida Mattos (2014) identified some problematic areas in its practice. Some of them can be broadly summarized as:  a) the teachers’ lack of experience and theoretical basis in critical literacy, b) the need to see critical literacy as a broad personal and social perspective rather than as plain methodology, and c) the persistence of behaviourist methodologies in mainstream English language teaching. With these, we mostly coincided in a report on the results of a pilot study on the practice of critical literacy in the context of literature teaching that we carried out in Argentina in 2013 (Basabe & Germani, 2014). In it, we acknowledged that, especially in view of our behaviorist background and our incipient contact with a critical approach, we chose a version of critical literacy that, not so much in the direction of its social commitment, focused instead on personal growth and on the ways we become ourselves. Doubtful though we were of the chances of promoting social transformation through critical literacy in our context, we still decided to put it into practice, expecting it would confidently “connect our classrooms not only with literature and teaching but, as our students demand from us, with meaningful learning and, above all, with things that are valuable for life” (39).

Critical literacy in the Changing Context of ELT

In contrast with the widespread use of a behaviourist approach to ELT and to most ELTEd as well, a critical approach develops from studies in education and is, therefore, sociological in nature. A basic difference between a behaviourist and a sociological approach to ELT was already established by Holiday (2005): whereas the former explores the distribution, authenticity, and handling of mainly oral communication in terms of psycholinguistic learning, the latter addresses the micro politics of the classroom in relation to the distribution of power and social relations in context. An awareness of such issues has also started informing the critical version of Applied Linguistics proposed by Pennycook (2001, 2006) and Luke and Dooley (2011).

Drawing on Andreotti, Barker, and Newell-Jones (2006), we understand that knowledge is an open system, and that, therefore, our teaching practice should be guided by three basic principles: a) all knowledge is partial and incomplete, b) all knowledge may be questioned, and c) we all have genuine and legitimate knowledge built in our own contexts. These premises may cause ELT move away from the repetitive, habit-forming enterprise it has become, and they may even help us displace gradually the central role of the English language teacher educator in order to allow greater participation on the part of the students.

This could only be achieved by recovering the centrality of questioning in the process of teaching and learning, as suggested by Freire and Faundez (2013/1985), who stated that questions are the root of knowledge, the way in which human curiosity and concern for learning is expressed. Questions become the initiators of exchanges with the other/s, and this allows for the recognition of other voices and for reflections emerging from the moment of interaction. Dissent is part of this process since dialogue can only take place if we accept the other as different, as someone from whom we can learn what we do not know. We expected this kind of dialogue would lead to a critical understanding of the other and in turn to the acceptance of difference and to collaborative intellectual work.

Within this perspective, we think of our students not only as bearers of questions but also as bearers of valid knowledge. This allows us to transform our practice into a praxis, a constant reciprocal reflection between theory and practice, or, in other words, “the reflexive and continuous integration of thought, wish, and action” (Simon, 1991, quoted in Pennycook, 2001:  91). This way of thinking our work differentiates from the classical behaviouristic view of ELTEd since it fosters more complex relations between theory and practice: one does not necessarily precede the other, but they both come together and integrate.

Our Pedagogical Experience

Context

The activities we propose were developed in 2014 in the course Literature in English II at the ELT program at UNLPam, a medium-sized state university in La Pampa, Argentina. The program at UNLPam is the only program in the context of ELTEd in the province. It takes four years, and, as of 2016, it was followed by about 300 students. Literatures in English II, encompassing the study of literary works produced in the 20th century,belongs in the fourth and last year of the course of studies, and it is preceded, in terms of literary education, by Introduction to Literary Studies and Literature in English I, the latter comprising the literary production of the English-speaking countries of the 19th century. It is taught along 17 weeks in the spring term (August to November) in weekly periods of 2 hours, and average groups are of about 10 students per year. The students are usually between 22 and 24 years old, and they have an advanced to proficient level of English.

Course Design

The contents of Literature in English II officially comprise the study of modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism as broad contemporary cultural processes, and the reading and analysis of literary texts written in the 20th century from a textual and a social and cultural perspective (UNLPam, 2013). The course had traditionally been taught following the three cultural axes mentioned above. However, in 2013 the teacher educator in charge of the course decided to reorganize the literary texts under study around three basic conflicts from which most of the dilemmas of literature tend to emerge: a) Wo/man and her/himself, b) Wo/man and wo/man, and c) Wo/man and society (Basabe, 2013). In a spiraling fashion from self to society, those conflicts were intended to guide the discussions of the literary texts that were considered appropriate to deal with the issues in the syllabus.

Those curricular changes implied simultaneous didactic changes which we had expected to happen because of our attempts to put into practice our own version of critical literacy. First, there was, after the classical classification by Carter and Long (1991), a movement from a cultural perspective on literature, understood as token of national history and ideology, to a paradigm of personal growth, by which literary texts would be taken as instruments to trigger the reflection about human conflicts of a universal nature. Second, there was a restructuring of the ways in which texts were handled, not in a chronological manner anymore but, following McRae (1991), mostly in view of the teachers’ and the students’ interests. Last, we tried to create safe spaces of dialogue and reflection in an attempt to think of the class as a community of learning. Thus, we made utmost efforts to leave the otherwise central role of the teacher educator, and we encouraged students to problematize the text on their own and to reflect on the relationships between language and society that emerged from the literary works. With this aim in mind, we designed activities integrating approaches that foster literary analysis and critical literacy.

Activities

In our capacity as Teacher Assistants to Literature in English II, we shared with the teacher educator in charge of the course, the design, implementation, and assessment of a series of activities intended to have our students read literature following the tenets of critical literacy. Our activities were framed after Freire’s (1983) conception of reading and having in mind the more recent and practical OSDE methodology (Andreotti et al., 2006), with which we had become recently acquainted then.

Freire (1983) stated that “the reading of the world always precedes the reading of the word” (10) and that “the understanding which comes from a critical reading of a text implies the perception of its relationship to the context” (5). This gradual awareness of the world that surrounds us is what makes us learn and change. We believed that learning would be significant only if our students were able to understand the meanings and implications of the literary texts and appropriate them conscientiously. OSDE, in turn, stands for open spaces for debate and enquiry, and its objective is to develop critical literacy and independent thought as the basis for innovation and change (Andreotti et al., 2006). This approach leads students to analyze the relationship between language and power, social practices, identity, and inequality through the development of the habit of asking questions already suggested by Freire (Freire & Faundez, 2013/1985; Freire & Shor, 2014/1987), while at the same time developing in them an awareness that there are no definite answers and no self-standing truths.

We present here activities used to approach three texts belonging to different genres:

a) the short story “The day they burned the books”, by Dominican writer Jean Rhys (1987/1968), in which a Creole widow burned her English husband’s books in the presence of two children, her son and his friend, the unnamed female narrator of the story,

b) the poem “The Facebook sonnet”, by Native American author Sherman Alexie (2011), and

c) the play The Crucible, by American playwright Arthur Miller (1952), the well-known tragedy about the events leading to the witch hunt in Salem, MA, in the 17th century.

We narrate briefly the way in which we conducted the classes and guided the discussions in each case. Appendices in which we provide guidelines to replicate our activities accompany each of the following narratives.

Activity #1: Questioning language and gender through post-colonial narrative

Rhys' (1987/1968) “The day they burned the books” was first approached by asking a personal question which intended to discover how the students related to the text when they first read it. Most of the students limited their answers to describe their impressions in simple terms, followed by brief justifications. As suggested in Appendix 1, the next step was oriented to a traditional kind of reading, that is, a linguistic and literary analysis of the text, which included questions on the type of narrator and point of view of the story, description of the characters, themes, symbols, etc.

The class then moved to critical reading by analyzing the socio-historical context of the story. Through this critical dialogue with the text, we tried to explore the reasons behind the reality represented in it and its political and historical context. We discussed, for example, the colonial setting, the interracial relations between the main characters in the story, the patriarchal structure of the family and society. The students perceived this stage as difficult and complex, and it required guidance from the teacher educator as regards cultural background in order to achieve a resistant reading that enters in conflict with the text, rather than passively submit to it.

As a final stage of the class, and prompted by the centrality of books in the story under analysis, we invited the students to a personal reflection related to the role played by books and literacy in their lives. By asking them to relate the context of the story to their own context and experiences we intended to move the class in the direction of critical literacy, trying to achieve an act of knowledge and not just a mere transfer of knowledge. However, when questioned about the difference between reading in their mother tongue and reading in a foreign language, the students seemed reluctant to problematize or question English as a dominant language.

At this stage, we had adopted an experimental attitude and therefore, our proposal was met by what we judged to be the students’ lack of awareness or their unwillingness to move in a critical direction. This implies constant research to see the results and limits of teacher intervention. One of the limits may be related to the transformative potential of the students. In that, we concur with Freire and Shor (2014/1987) when they stated, “if you go beyond their [the students’] wish and capacity, or if you work outside their language and topics of interest, you will face their resistance” (96). Yet, we consider there might be ways to raise the students’ awareness of social and cultural issues, such as those that we mentioned above, which deserve to be discussed.

The follow-up activity consisted in the creative re-writing of the narrative from the perspective of a character other than the narrator. The students’ productions showed their identification with a female character (the Creole mother of the protagonist) and their approach to the text from the perspective of gender and racial discrimination. Some of the answers included segments that were closer to the present context of the students rather than to the remote context of the story. In one of the texts, for example, a student referred to women’s rights and concepts derived from cultural and post-colonial criticism. By analytically translocating the context of the story to her own immediate context, the student was, in Freirean (1983) terms, re-writing the world by re-writing the word.

Activity #2: Exploring attitudes to social networks through contemporary poetry

In a slide of a PowerPoint presentation and in individual copies, the students were given the article the from the title of Alexie’s (2011) “The Facebook sonnet” and 2 blanks, and we disclosed that the last word in it labelled its poetic form, as proposed in Appendix 2. The students were also given the last word of each verse. By paying attention to the rhyming scheme and the number of lines, the students were expected to discover that it was a sonnet, which they did. After that, we proposed an instance of creative writing, which consisted in their creating their own sonnet in small groups with the words that had been provided. They shared their production, and, as a result, they started making inferences about the theme of the original sonnet.

Next, students received a copy of the whole poem without the word Facebook in the title, and the teacher educator read it aloud. First, the students shared their ideas in a brainstorming fashion. They noticed, for example, that, with its religious vocabulary, it is intended to lead the reader to reflect on contemporary social relationships. The teacher educator also guided them to observe the references to the Internet and social networking, which made the students discover that the poem actually referred to Facebook. Then, after a close reading of the poem, the stance of the poetic voice towards the social network was discussed as a class, and we identified the intended readership of the poem. We agreed that the poem presented an adverse criticism of social networks and that it was addressed to middle-aged readers. The students were then invited to debate on their relationship with Facebook and, probably because of the contemporaneity of the issue, they felt truly confident to express their opinions.

It was through the linguistic analysis of the poem that the students became aware of its ironic and cautionary tone and that they reflected on the blurring of boundaries between the public and the private spheres in current times. However, it was through the social organization of the class as an open space that we allowed free exchange of ideas and that we could build a community of learning offering possibilities of self-awareness and personal growth. Moreover, some of the students were so eager to share their views that we were almost sure the discussion extended even beyond the class.

Activity #3: Coming to terms with human conflict through social drama

For a critical analysis of Miller’s (1952) The Crucible, we focused on the description of the interpersonal relations established between the characters in the play and on the ways in which the ensuing discussion informed our perspectives on social issues in general. For an initial reading and as instructed in Appendix 3, the context of production and reception of the play and its structure and content were analyzed as a class, with the backdrop of still slides of one of the latest film versions of the play (Hytner, 1996).

Next, during the stage of critical reading, the students suggested a list of the main characters in the play and shared brief characterizations of them. They were asked to form groups and design a sociogram, in which they displayed the social bonds among the characters by means of arrows and labelled the feelings experienced by them through a single word in English. Later, the sociograms were exhibited, and the students elaborated on their interpretations of the social relationships in the play and explored the attitudes and intentions behind the characters’ actions.

Finally, at the critical literacy stage, the teacher spotted the differences in the interpretations of the social setting of the play as shown in the sociograms and elicited the reasonings of the varied group readings. This activity led them to an acknowledgement of the constructed nature of both discourse and interpretation, as they were invited to become aware of the plausibility and validity of their own readings of the word and the world. If the students feel they belong in a safe community of knowledge, they are able to actively participate in an open space of debate and enquiry. Moreover, once provided with the context of political repression in the USA at the time the play was written, some students associated it with the period of state terrorism under the dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983). We can suggest then that literature could still be a powerful source to reflect upon social conflict and that, through it, it is possible to grow critical.

Assessment and Discussion

To evaluate the implementation of critical literacy, we made class observations, and we carried out surveys among our students at the end of the course. In this section we share the assessment of our pedagogical experience derived from those sources. A limitation of those, though, is that observations could be made only on our practice of Activities #1 and #2, while, on the contrary, the surveys were intended to gather data on broad issues of course design and implementation.

As we have stated in an initial report, “critical literacy puts strain on teaching” (Basabe & Germani, 2014: 39) because its use in the classroom questions the apparent stability and rightness of our teaching practices. One of the difficulties we found was related to the way in which our students understand knowledge. In this, we concur with Andreotti et al. (2016) in that modifying the traditional conception of knowledge as an exchange of contents rather than as an exchange of personal experiences is a complex task. Our eliciting clear themes based on personal readings, for example, was, as reported above, regularly met with only partial enthusiasm. Generating a resistant reading and questioning ‘official’ interpretations was another area where we could not advance much. During the lesson in which Activity #1 was put into practice, for instance, the teacher educator suggested an “incorrect” interpretation for the students to defend, argue, and discuss his point based on the text, which the observer valued as “very interesting… I was very much involved and willing to participate” (Garcia Giménez, 2014). However, the students did not accept the teacher’s proposal, which can be interpreted as a case of resistance to the methodology and to the playful role assumed by the teacher. This attitude, in turn, can be read, though, as their actual enacting of the right to question (Freire & Faundez, 2013/1985). Last,the students also sometimes perceived interpreting literary texts in relationship to their context of production as difficult and complex, and it required guidance from the teacher educator as regards cultural background. This was particularly noticeable in Activities #1 and #3, in relationship with racial issues in the Caribbean and the historical background of the USA, which required that the teacher educator provided information about the cultural context for the students to be able to interpret the characters’ actions and attitudes. We firmly believe, though, that with critical literacy in the context of literature teaching, we are on our way to raise our students’ awareness of social and cultural issues that deserve to be discussed.

As regards our achievements, we found that most students could express that they had learned what they reported as finding pleasure when reading a literary text (Surveys #1, #2, and #3). The student answering survey #1, declared,

I learned to enjoy the complexities of language in the literary texts. Before this literature, I only paid attention to the plot of the stories and the themes, without paying attention to         how they were reached through language. I see it positively because one can enjoy   literature from another level, from how it is written and how each theme or sensation is achieved.

Interestingly, the student relates aesthetic pleasure with the development of a linguistic ability to decode the literary text, which should be a key issue in critical literacy.

We could also cultivate fruitful interactions between teachers and students and among students. The students reported, “interventions by the students were favoured and group work was encouraged” and that “The teachers always tried to elicit answers from the students, though it [to get the students’ answers] was not always possible” (Survey #3). Finally, one student also stated, “I learned to trust myself and my partners” (Survey #2). This, we thought, was the result of the creation of open spaces for debate and enquiry in which students could work hand in hand with the teacher educators as a community of learning (Andreotti et al., 2006). Our practice fostered open-mindedness and acceptance of different positions, “each of us gave a personal ‘touch’ to the subject and to the interpretation of the texts,” reported a student (Survey # 1); whereas another explained that, “I learnt that we can have different perspectives on the same story. From my classmates I learned that we can always have opposing ideas on the same topic while having read the same material” (Survey #4). Finally, we discovered that the students were able to appreciate their personal production and became aware of their creativity (Surveys #1, #2, #4, and #5). They acknowledged that “it [creative writing] is difficult but once you start, you realize you can do it” (Survey #1) and that “it was perfect as a way to put theory into practice” (Survey #5). Even though these steps in the direction of critical literacy may not have been as rich in terms of social commitment as those dreamt by Freire (2009/1970), we concluded we were far away from our initial view of literature as a token of the foreign culture.  Moreover, our version of critical literacy has certainly moved through the literary text towards a paradigm of personal growth that our students would be able to replicate in their classrooms once they became teachers.

CONCLUSION

Working in the direction of critical literacy can prove to be fruitful. The students depart from a traditional kind of reading by carrying out a linguistic analysis of the literary works and paying attention to form and content. Then, they proceed to a critical reading period in which they can identify and discuss conflicts and power relations present in the texts to move later into the area of critical literacy, when they are able to discuss those topics in relation to their own social context. We believe that this approach to the literary text may lead the students to face personal dilemmas, to reflect on human relations and the conflicts that may arise from them, to imagine different perspectives on the themes of the works, and to adopt a position in relation to the topics and characters present in the literary texts. We believe that the activities we propose here offer a variety of potential alternatives towards critical literacy and practical, innovative ways of teaching and learning literature. We positively feel then that working in this direction we are on our way towards a pedagogy of possibilities.

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* María Isabel Arriaga: Profesora en Inglés, Universidad Nacional de La Pampa (Argentina). Tesista en Maestría en Inglés, mención Literatura Angloamericana, Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto (Argentina) y en Licenciatura en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa, Universidad Nacional de La Pampa. Estudiante de Maestría en Estudios Sociales y Culturales, Universidad Nacional de La Pampa. En la actualidad Profesora Adjunta interina a cargo de Cultura de los Países de Habla Inglesa, Ayudante Interina en Literatura de Habla Inglesa II y Jefe de Trabajos Prácticos de Literatura de Habla Inglesa I en el Profesorado y Licenciatura en Inglés, Departamento de Lenguas Extranjeras, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, UNLPam. Docente-investigadora en las áreas de Literatura (principal interés: literatura de los siglos XX y XXI, Literatura irlandesa contemporánea en Inglés) y Literacidad crítica (principal interés: formación del profesorado a partir de una lectura crítica de textos literarios). Autora de numerosas publicaciones y ponencias relacionadas con la literatura irlandesa contemporánea, poscolonial y de los siglos XX-XXI en Argentina y Brasil.

** Miriam Patricia Germani: Profesora de Nivel Medio y Superior en Inglés, Universidad Nacional de La Pampa (Argentina) y y Magister en Inglés, mención Literatura Angloamericana, Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto (Argentina). En la actualidad Profesora Adjunta Regular a cargo de Fonética y Fonología Inglesa IV y Profesora Adjunta Interina a cargo de Fonética y Fonología Inglesa II en el Profesorado y Licenciatura en Inglés, Departamento de Lenguas Extranjeras, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, UNLPam. Jefe de Trabajos Prácticos de Literatura Norteamericana del Siglo XX entre 2002 y 2011 y desde 2013 colabora en la cátedra Literatura de Habla Inglesa II (UNLPam). Docente-investigadora en las áreas de Literatura (principal interés: literatura poscolonial) y Lingüística (principal interés: entonación del discurso). Co-autora de los libros: Estudios Literarios sobre la Cultura Chicana (2001) y Towards an Ever-Changing Canon. Cultural Critical Perspectives on New Literatures Written in English (2006). Autora de numerosas publicaciones y ponencias relacionadas con la literatura poscolonial y con la fonología presentadas en Argentina, Chile, Uruguay y Brasil.

1 An initial version of this paper was presented at the Second Latin American Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in Higher Education, held in Córdoba, Argentina, in November, 2015.