Intercultural learning styles (intercultural sensitivity) and modalities in argumentation letter in bilingual students in modern languages from a colombian and a french university

Abstract

In the field of individual differences and bilingual training, in particular of future foreign language teachers (FL), the learning styles that students display in the learning processes of a second language are influenced by their own culture in interaction with the culture associated with the FL, configuring affective, psychological and cognitive traits that, although they are individual, they also respond to cultural characteristics linked to their community of origin. The intercultural learning styles (Leiva, 2015; Jiménez, 2004) is a concept that recognizes sociocultural aspects of learning styles (Keefe, 1988), which in this research focus on intercultural sensitivity as a dimension of interculturality, assumed as social skills that the individual could develop in contexts of contact between languages and cultures (Chen and Starosta, 2000).

In this sense, the written argumentative skill, a textual typology that predominates in higher education, is influenced by the learning styles associated with intercultural sensitivity, which is reflected in the modalities of argumentative discourse (Gosselin, 2010). This is   how, from the theories of school bilingualism and language sciences, this qualitative   case study describes how learning styles, linked to intercultural sensitivity, are reflected in bilingual written argumentative competence in terms of discursive modalities in a argumentative letter in L1 and L2 in bilingual undergraduate students in modern languages (French and Spanish FL) from two universities, one Colombian and one French. In general, the results show a profile of learning styles where there is a significant presence of the reflective style and the verbal style and a balance between the sensory and the intuitive, and between the sequential and the global. Regarding intercultural sensitivity, a high favorable and neutral attitude is evidenced that facilitates intercultural interaction. From the analysis of intra and interindividual contrastive rhetoric, it is found that the outstanding modalities are the epistemic, the alethic and the deontic that validate the representations from the objective, the subjective and / or the institutional perspective.