Nahuatl Language in Cross-Cultural Education: A Challenge to Develop Communication Skills

Nahuatl Language has a long history in education as a second language. However, as a mother tongue, it has long been regarded as an obstacle to the education and development of communities. Since the early twentieth century, literacy programs in Mexico included Nahuatl language as a goal of education, not as a communication or instruction tool itself. Currently, the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) points out that the teaching of indigenous languages should be based on local and regional educational proposals observing the particularities of each indigenous language and culture. Therefore, it was decided the development of curriculum standards that establish the pedagogical basis for teaching Indigenous language as "an object of study." SEP adds that Indigenous Language Curriculum must take the social practices of the language and should be organized into four general topics: 1) The family and community life 2) oral tradition, literature and historical evidence 3) inter-life and relationship with other towns and 4) study and dissemination of knowledge. In order to evaluate the role of language skills in Nahuatl curriculum, this paper analyze the linguistic and didactic contents of the textbooks published by SEP in differences modern variants. As from linguistic and methodological inconsistencies, it propose some standards useful to develop linguistics and communicative skills in an intercultural context.