Incorporating an etnosemiotic approach for literacy education of the Zapoteca language in Mexican indigenous communities

As a strategy to avoid the loss of the Zapoteca language, the Mexican government has separated elementary schooling into Spanish education and bilingual education (or indigenous education). However, this differentiation has only complicated the problem as the conditions between urban and indigenous students are not the same. Thus, our research aims to contribute to the creation of didactic material supported by interactive multimedia objects for improving literacy education in the early stages. This research combines four methodological techniques to establish a better process of teaching this ancestral language: ethnographic study, semiotic analysis, instructional design and user-centered design. We have identified a list of common problems in writing and reading the Zapoteca language, to understand the children's way of thinking and the language used by them, and we have recovered images from children's visual memory (which is associated to different concepts). Finally, the proposed educational contents should evaluate, respect, reuse and study community experiences to avoid the degradation of indigenous language and culture. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.