Bridging the gap between regional culture, curriculum and foreign language learning

Abstract

Framed within the Sociocultural theory and following the principles of the action-research approach in the classroom, this work presents final results concerning the connection between the teaching and learning of English through the incorporation of regional culture contents. To do so, a set of contextualized culturally-based classes were carried out in a public elementary school located in a Colombian Caribbean town. The project was developed through three stages named diagnosis, action plan, and evaluation. The results revealed that regional culture provided a contextualized environment to work in the classroom. Students acquired new and better alternatives to learn a foreign language and to recover their culture isolated from the school. It can be stated that the sociocultural approach supports theoretical and methodological principles to acquire a foreign language, enabling the students to progressively reinforce their ability to create and transfer meaningful tasks to other real situations.