Simulación Sociocultural: Aprendizaje Experiencial del Lenguaje en ILE en los Salones de Clase Distritales.

Abstract

Local students seem to be in need of a more practical and lively way to learn in the EFL classrooms. This project is intended to satisfy such need by introducing the sociocultural simulation as an strategy able to offer a more real language learning experience. Through the integration of the target language (English) and its cultural component (US as a model) towards its immediate practice in a modeling of a real-world context (simulation). An action research was first applied and then designed towards a pedagogical intervention implemented in two schools in a seventh grade and an eleventh grade. The former had the opportunity to experience the recess-time game played by schoolers of their same age in the United States called Dodgeball. The latter practiced their business skills by organizing an American seasonal gathering called Fall Gathering. The students´ and researcher´s discourses were collected through journals and video transcripts and inductively analyzed with the expectation of discovering supportive evidence about the impact the sociocultural simulation may have in the students´language learning. The results of the research suggests that an important impact is evident in two main findings. Firstly, its liveliness is successfully brought into the public EFL classrooms and secondly, it promotes the students self awareness of their own process and the understanding of the culture-language relation towards the language learning enhancement. The study concludes that when the learners are offered with lively strategies such as simulations that are enriched with the language-culture relation component, the language classroom experience is improved and pedagogical benefits such as innovation and effectiveness become part of the results.