An exploration of Colombian EFL teachers’ knowledge base through teachers’ reflection

This article reports on a qualitative, descriptive-interpretative study carried out in the M.A. in Applied Linguistics to TEFL at Universidad Distrital in Bogotá. It describes both the way the knowledge base of five in-service teachers has been constructed and the elements that articulate it. Data were collected during a period of seven months through journals and interviews. The findings show that teachers’ knowledge base is the result of life experience and educational process. The components of knowledge base that teachers favored were content knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge and the knowledge about their role, their students and the teaching context. The study thus indicates that the knowledge base of language teacher education should not merely be founded on the knowledge provided during professional training; it should also be understood against the backdrop of teachers’ language learning stories and instructional practice experiences, and within a particular sociocultural milieu.