Popular narratives, festivals and gastronomy of the Engabao commune for the teaching-learning of the kichwa language

Abstract

This paper presents a didactic strategy used to improve the teaching-learning process of Kichwa in a bilingual intercultural school located on the Ecuadorian coast, where Kichwa is not spoken as a mother tongue. It is based on the principle expressed by Shobeiri (2016) that "...it has been observed that the learning and teaching of a language shows its creativity to the extent that it reveals cultural patterns that are equivalent or transferable to a particular language" (p. 664). To this end, popular stories collected in Spanish were identified and evaluated. Once translated into Kichwa, these stories were used in a sixth grade class of basic education for five weeks. To collect the folktales and assess their importance, ethnographic techniques such as participant observation, semi-structured interviews, field diaries, and key informants were used. For the design of the didactic tools and the educational process, we used pedagogical techniques such as collaborative work in the classroom, popular narratives translated into Kichwa and adequate learning environments to give didactic-pedagogical use to the popular stories. These narratives were taken from legends, festivals and gastronomy in the teaching of a Kichwa closer to the students. The most important conclusion is that the contextualization of the teaching of a non-native language has positive effects.