Learning Spanish in a Nasa indigenous community (Aprendizaje del español en una comunidad indígena Nasa)

Abstract

The priority of the bilingual intercultural education of the Nasa community in Colombia is to teach Spanish as a second language; however, there are no studies that evaluate this process. For this reason, this study sought to describe the level of appropriation of Spanish by the monolingual Nasa Yuwe–speaking learners who are in the first to third grades at the indigenous rural school of Farallones in the community of Pueblo Nuevo, municipality of Silvia Cauca (Colombia). This description was made through the diagnostic evaluation of learning Nasa Yuwe as the mother tongue and Spanish as the new language, in addition to administering a sociolinguistic survey to the parents and holding an interview with the teacher in charge of teaching these languages. The results showed oral mastery of Nasa Yuwe and an emphasis on teaching the sublexical aspects of Spanish to learn how to read and write it. This information suggests that Spanish learning is approached as a foreign language, not a second language, as its context views it.