- •1 Introduction
- •Purpose of the Study
- •Research Questions.
- •Key Words
- •1.4 Significance of the study
- •2 Literature Review
- •2.1 Nahuatl
- •2.1.1 History Nahuatl civilization
- •2.1.2 Nahuatl grammar
- •Nahuatl in Puebla
- •Figure 2.2.2
- •2.2.1The Mixtec of Puebla
- •2.3 Education in Mexico
- •2.3.1 The history of the indigenous education in Mexico
- •2.4 Bilingual education at present
- •2.4.1 Benefits of bilingual education
- •2.5 Critical Pedagogy.
- •2.6 The role of the school and family in the bilingual education
- •2.6.1 Empowering Parents
- •2.6.2 How oral tradition can be used to teach academic skills
- •3. Methodology
- •3.1 Subjects
- •3.2 Instruments
- •3.3 Interviews
- •3.4 Activities
- •4. Findings
- •Answers of interview made to adults.
- •4.2 Answers of interview made to teenagers.
- •4.3 Answers of interview made to children.
- •4.4 Results of activities applied to children
- •5. Conclusions
- •5.1 General overview
- •5.2 Implications for further study.
- •5.3 Limitations of the study
- •5.4 Directions for further research
- •Appendix 1: Poster used to let people know about the conference.
- •Appendix 4: the questionaire administered to parents
- •Appendix 5: the questionaire administered to teenagers
- •Appendix 10: legend of the lagoon of xochiltepec in spanish
- •Appendix 11: legend of the lagoon of xochiltepec in nahuatl
3.3 Interviews
The interviews were written in Spanish and done in Spanish to facilitate the process with data collection and transcription; however, there were some interviews which were conducted in Nahuatl in order to interview some people who do not speak Spanish. These interviews were conducted with parents who have children and adolescents studying in any school (see appendix 4, 5 and 6). Moreover there were a couple of interviews for teachers who are working in the bilingual and indigenous school. The material used consisted of a tape recorder to collect the answers and written interviews. After that the transcriptions of the data collected were made.
3.4 Activities
In the bilingual school three activities were applied to children in 4th and 5th grade. The first activity consisted of teaching numbers in Nahuatl (see appendix 7). Printed copies were given to each student, the student should identify and repeat the number. Children finished the activity in 20 minutes. The second activity focused on identifying the body parts. An illustrated printed copy for identifying the Nahuatl names of body parts (see appendix 8) were given to the children which they finished in 25 minutes. In the third activity students had to identify the colors and numbers in an image. They finished the activity successfully in about 15 minutes. After that, a legend in Nahuatl was told to the children in 30 minutes which was about a lagoon near to the community and was well known by the habitants. Children have to understand the legend by reading and giving feedback about lack of vocabulary. Finally an interview was conducted with the children and answers were given by questionnaires in 15 minutes. These activities had the purpose finding out what children think about Nahuatl.
4. Findings
Although Nahuatl is the most widely spoken indigenous language in Mexico it does not escape racism and discrimination even from its own speakers. Not only is there discrimination in speech but also there is discrimination even in indigenous bilingual education. Also bilingual schools face a serious problem of discrimination even by native speakers themselves. Even with the best educational method and a good dissemination of information about the importance of Nahuatl, changing the opinion of the bilingual population about the advantages and benefits of being bilingual is definitely not an easy task. This research aimed to promote, understand and learn about all the aspects of language: cultural, speaking, writing, reading and listening.
The aim of this particular chapter is to analyze and describe the use of interviews applied to children that study in a bilingual elementary school, along with teenagers and adults of a bilingual community in order to determine the perception of Nahuatl and of bilingual education. During those interviews most of the problems faced were to get the attention of people about the language. People from small towns are very shy and not sociable. And as was mentioned before people who do not speak Spanish even when they accepted a request for an interview, they prefer to ignore the questions.
Also people who speak Spanish break away from questions saying they do not know anything about Nahuatl. Anyway the people who do not speak Spanish considered for interviews were parents with children studying in an indigenous bilingual school especially the school from this town. The graphs present the results of the interviews. The first set of graphs show the answers of the first interview made to adults.