Ideologies Revealed During the Construction of Meaning in an EFL Class

Abstract

This article reports on an interpretive qualitative study conducted at a public university in Bogotá with 26 pre-service social studies teachers. It is focused on unveiling which ideologies are discovered when they construct the meaning of texts through text-based tasks in an English as a foreign language class. The data were collected by using class video recordings and students’ artifacts. The data analysis procedure follows an inductive process based on grounded theory. Results indicated three subsidiary categories called Shattering the Establishment, Perspectives From a Counter-Hegemonic Position, and Resisting the Mainstream. Furthermore, there is the core category Habitus, which assembles those subsidiary categories in an internalized system of fixed dispositions.

Keywords

• Construction of meaning
• grounded theory
• habitus
• ideology
• text-based task