Interculturality as a transversal axis in foreign language teaching in higher education. The case of Ecuador.

Abstract

The demands of indigenous and afro-descendant organizations, inserted in the social fabric, have focused on the demand for respect for their identities, which has generated a greater demand for visibility and tolerance of these populations.
 
Such a panorama represents a challenge in curricular configuration, which is an instrument of orientation of the learning process in the higher education, articulating key elements, through transversal axes. This paper focuses on a treatment of interculturality as a transversal axis, contributing elements to the debate on the
subject and promoting the design of new ways to strengthen higher education. An extensive bibliographic search was made to know in detail the different aspects on the subject to investigate.
 
Subsequently, only the most updated and relevant references were selected, which will be related to the topic addressed. A maximum number of references between 10 and 25 was established. Articles, normative documents and books were included. The keywords that were used in the search engines of Google Academic and Altavista were “interculturality”, “transversal axis” and higher education. The literature review process contributed to discard 5 of the pre-selected papers since they did not include relevant information.
 
The bibliographical research was carried out with 15 documents, published between the years 2005 and 2017.
It is concluded that interculturality takes shape through an intercultural approach, which focuses on the interaction between cultures.
 
Its application is complex in a context in which possible contacts and transversality in the curriculum development of the English language subject are avoided, in order that linguistic and communicative skills can be validated through sufficiency tests; which reinforces a traditionalist conception of the teaching-learning process and limits the role of language as a channel for learning ways of life and cultural perspectives.