Success Factors in the Pedagogical Management of the English Language Teaching Managers

Introduction

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has arrived with many changes in every aspect of the world. Now there are machines, computers, robots, and all kinds of cyber devices which are now being in charge of the jobs that people used to have. It is a way of making human lives easier, but at the same time it is a challenge for everyone to keep on with all this changes.

This Industrial Revolution has opened the minds of people and has brought new connections between countries. Now it is common for people to go from one country to another to get a better job opportunity, leaving behind the borders that were bigger in the past. Also, there are better opportunities for education, making it easier to exchange students from one higher education institution to another on the other side of the world.

Consequently, in this globalized world, the English language has become the international language, and it is used not only to communicate, but also to share research information and to connect the different countries around the world. For this reason, it is necessary to have educated people in the English language so that they can contribute to the development of the countries.

In this sense, higher education institutions have a great challenge of educating students not only in the specialty they chose, but also in a second language, specially the English language, which is the main language for business and for education. In this way, when students have proficiency in the English language, they are most likely to have better job opportunities.

So, learning English around the world is a high relevance matter that needs to be considered by governments and Ministries of Education. Many First World countries, such as China or Finland, have developed great strategies to develop the English language in students, and most of the inhabitants of these countries have a good level of proficiency in the English language and even some other languages.

In countries like Colombia and Mexico, there is still a low level in the English language of people, so these countries have developed strategies to work on developing this level and at the same time develop the economy of the countries through their citizens. One of these strategies is to offer a language education to the students from public and private higher education institutions, where they can better exploit their potential and contribute to the growing of research and society.

In this sense, higher education institutions created English language institutes to offer language education to students, but for this language institutes to work, it is necessary to have good managers who are not only prepared in administrative theories, but also in the pedagogical knowledge needed to understand the functioning of an education center.

These managers should be well trained to be pedagogical managers. It is common for people to think that the pedagogical management is only carried out by teachers, who are in charge of the pedagogical process; however, managers of educational institutions need to be a part of the pedagogical process, which is where the term “pedagogical management” comes from.

The pedagogical management includes making sure that the curricula is being applied by teachers, supervising the job that teachers are doing, working along with teachers in the construction of the curricula, helping to design methodologies for teaching, training teachers in new methodologies, being able to have a relation with parents and students as the one that teachers have, etc.

It is important to emphasize that pedagogical management is very important within educational institutions since it is in this type of management that the necessary changes are generated to guarantee educational quality and to be aware of what society and the community in which the educational centers are located really need; therefore, as mentioned before, it is also important that the managers of educational institutions have a profile that responds to this process and the dynamism that it requires. (Cárdenas, Marín and Vargas, 2008).

In Colombia, the Ministry of National Education developed the National Bilingualism Program (PNB) 2004-2019 to create competitive citizens capable of communicating in the English language to make the country known internationally and improve the level of life of Colombians. For this reason, it developed a series of standards for the teaching of the English language with the aim of unifying the teaching of English in the country and thus achieve bilingual citizens by the year 2019.

Therefore, the high education institutions in Colombia, created language institutes to offer an integrated and quality education to university students that also includes the learning of a second language, especially English.