Page 19 - Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

3 Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

FOREWORD

This volume brought together the research work done by specialist teachers in the teaching and lear-
ning of languages of diverse national universities. This book represents a panorama of the research
processes in the area of linguistics applied to language teaching that takes place in the Mexican
university context.

Given the need to have a catalog of research projects in this area of Higher Education in Mexico,
specialists in language learning-teaching were invited to send their contributions. Academics from 17
institutions responded to the book coordinators’ call and, in this way, the texts presented here were
compiled in five thematic sections: Language learning and teaching, Evaluation of language learning,
Teachers’ training and professional development, Foreign language and culture, and Literacy.

As it can be observed, the works presented here address, from different theoretical and investigative
perspectives, problems inherent to the context in which the academic or group of academics in char-
ge of each research project perform. Some of these works are framed within the qualitative approach,
others used a quantitative methodology and others chose to use a mixed methodology.

Bringing together the work of academics whose perspectives vary as much as their contexts was a
demanding and interesting task given the times and the workload that academics must fulfill, and the
richness of all the contributions. However, when there is a real interest in contributing to strengthen
our area of professional expertise, those who are devoted to language teaching make an effort to ac-
complish, improve, innovate and adequate our work to the contexts and conditions to be addressed.

The chapters included here represent the current work of language professionals, so, the readers will
have the opportunity to be at the forefront of the research processes that are carried out in the area of
linguistics applied to language teaching at Mexican universities. In this sense, the compendium co-
vers diverse views on common problems. Therefore, the reader will be able to find not only solutions
to these but also ways to approach their study, ways to investigate them from their own perspective.

This book will be useful for researchers, professors, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and
for all those interested in updating regarding the advances of Applied Linguistics in the arena of Lan-
guage Teaching. Here, far from presenting dogmatic positions, the texts were thought to propitiate
the analysis, discussion and dissemination of the advances and the results of recent research in this
area of knowledge.