Editorial

We are pleased to present to the academic community the number eighth of the Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal which is the product of hard work of the Editorial Committee, the collaboration of our faculty and students of the Masters Program in Applied Linguistics, and the invaluable support of the national and international evaluators of the articles. We are thankful to all the people in the Office of Publications at Universidad Distrital because they have worked closely with us every year to make the CJAL a successful project and a high quality publication of the School of Sciences and Education at Universidad Distrital.

It is important to share with you, the readers, that in April 2006 our journal was indexed in the Educational Research Abstracts (ERA) in U.K. and the MLA Bibliography Periodicals in the United States. We also made one more international agreement to exchange publications on education with Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica in July.

In this volume we present articles on different topics related to English Language Teaching, Foreign Language Learning and Teaching and Applied Linguistics. We have three articles that address literacy practices from different perspectives, three that discuss cultural aspects on second and foreign language learning and bilingual education, two that deal with promoting autonomous learning, one that presents the use of hypertext designs as a way to promote EFL writing, one that addresses storytelling as a way to promote EFL with adults, one on gender and language in the EFL classroom and another which is a theoretical review about developing pragmatic competence in the EFL classroom.

We have kept the regular sections that contain articles on Research Reports and Theoretical Discussion Papers but have added one more section which presents Classroom Pedagogical Projects. In this regards, I want to highlight the significant contribution of graduate students from our program who were willing to share their innovative experiences in their classrooms as teachers of English and to devoted many hours of hard work writing and revising their articles to be ready for publication. The final section presents the abstracts of the research in progress that second year graduate students are implementing in their classrooms as part of the requirements for thesis and graduation.

The development of graduate students research is supported by the work of all the researchers in the program that belong to different nationally recognized research groups such as Lectoescrinautas, Didactec, English Didactics and Technology, from Universidad Distrital, Profile from Universidad Nacional, Hypermedia, Evaluation and English Learning from Universidad Pedagogica Nacional, and Language and Cognition, and Learning and Society of Information from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Thanks to all the efforts. collaboration and commitment of different people that believe in the quality of public education and to the financial support from the School of Sciences and Education at Distrital University, we present to you this volume.

Amparo Clavijo Olarte
Director Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal