Textbooks and enculturation of spanish foreign language in Ivory Coast

Abstract

Interculturality is a concept to which we have become very accustomed in recent decades, in a globalized world aimed at promoting the encounter and contact of cultures in all its corners. In the educational field, the intercultural approach encourages respect for the culture of the other and, as regards the teaching-learning of foreign languages in particular, means taking into account the socio-cultural realities of the students to make learning more meaningful. In Ivory Coast, until the end of the 90s of the last century, the Spanish Foreign Language (onwards SFL) textbooks elaborated and published in France for its former colonies proposed the learning of Spanish as a simple process of acculturation of the Ivorian student. In 1998, the collection of manuals Horizontes produced by African professionals in the transition towards a communicative approach inaugurated an era of enculturation of Spanish in a frankly intercultural dynamic. Today, ¡Ya estamos! (2018, 2019) and ¡Más allá! (2020), the new SFL textbooks for middle and high school confirm this
dynamic. When learning a foreign language and its culture (acculturation) in the context of non-immersion, the student has to learn to talk also about his own realities in this language (enculturation), which implies the incorporation of new concepts in the lexicon of the target language.