Empowering Education: Sustainability through Technology

Abstract

Learning English as a foreign language is a fundamental axis in Colombia as in the rest of the Latin American countries since it allows all subjects to obtain great work and academic opportunities related to SDG goals. The increasing access to technology has promoted the inclusion of technological tools in the classroom, which, from our perspectives, represents advancements as well as challenges. In that line, the need for knowing the perceptions of teachers and students regarding the use of technology in the teaching and learning process of English arises. In the quest for delving into perceptions, a semi-structured interview was applied to 300 students from the Caribbean University Corporation, a private institution in Colombia, in a mixed approach, guiding the study toward a descriptive, cross-sectional, and longitudinal research.Results highlight that, from the students' perception, the interactive role of technology allows the integration of different learning styles, which widens the possibilities to learn through different lenses and approaches beyond the mainstream classroom. From the teachers' perspective, technologies support student learning and allow the diversification of the pedagogical strategies.Conclusions suggest that the use of technology in the foreign language teaching and learning processeswould require to understand factors such as the role of the student, their learning styles, and the importance of the selected technological resource, their support for learning, teacher's role and teaching approach, as well as their SDG pedagogical strategies to intertwine throughout the process.