Educational policies for the teaching of English in higher education in Ecuador

The teaching-learning processes of contents and the human capacities that emerge from them on a daily basis are determined by the policies, plans and concrete projects that regulate the subject and the teaching of English is no exception; thus, it is the national, regional, local and institutional policies that produce or delay, as the case may be, the conditions of possibility for the achievement of the programmatic objectives of a subject of strategic use such as English. By means of a descriptive, analytical and documented methodology, the objective of this article was to review some educational policies for the teaching of English in higher education in Ecuador. The results obtained allow us to conclude that, although educational policies are regularly designed asymmetrically, from a hegemonic institutional center (State, Teachers, University, among others) and imposed in a relatively consensual way to the rest of the actors of the educational process, in the cases known by this research, the successful teaching of English also depends significantly on the creative capacity of the teacher and, even more, on the commitment of the students in the development of their language skills in order to achieve meaningful learning.