The development of intercultural education through the teaching-learning of French as a foreign language (FLE): a review of the literature

Abstract

There is no doubt that intercultural education in school contexts is not making any progress. To inquire about this, the main objective of this contribution was to describe the importance of approaching intercultural education, through a teaching-learning process of FLE, by means of a literature review. Our exploration is executed by means of a meta-analysis carried out with 22 research articles of the most relevant studies carried out, both nationally and internationally, published in scientific journals in the years 2006-2020, in the Dialnet, Scopus database. The results reveal that, at the state level, there is hardly any empirical research associated with the contributions of the FLE in the development of intercultural education. Moreover, it is remarkable the implicit and explicit absence of intercultural competences in the curriculum of the different works analyzed. The few studies selected are characterized by their good intentions to pretend the implementation with some brushstrokes of intercultural education in the field of FLE, however, this do not clearly represent the different cultural realities of their school contexts, they are focusing their interest on visualizing certain cultures and hiding others. It ends with proposals, such as the introduction of real supports to intercultural education, which avoid the consequences of cultural biases in the curriculum, which reproduce social inequalitie.