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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Language, Culture and Diversity
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1507019
This article is part of the Research Topic Inclusive Education in Intercultural Contexts View all 4 articles

Intercultural Competence in Multimodal Reading Comprehension. Innovative Practice for Cultural Diversity in the Multicultural Classroom

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences, Ñuñoa, Chile
  • 2 Centro de investigación avanzada en educación (CIAE), Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile, Chile

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Globally, school classrooms are becoming more and more multicultural, since migration is a phenomenon that has an impact on a planetary level. In Latin America and the Caribbean, different migration flows have occurred in the last ten years, as a result of natural disasters, political instability, and the search for optimal wages, among other reasons. The migrant population carries with them their cultural identity, which is reflected in the classroom. In the Chilean case, there are schools with a high percentage of Latin American migrant students, which implies an intercultural pedagogical challenge. In the context of learning reading comprehension, data emerge that place migrant students on the SIMCE Reading test with lower scores than local students. Reading performance may have causes in the access gap as an educational level. However, despite the origins of this inequality, there is an immediate need to intervene didactically in the classroom to enhance reading comprehension in multicultural contexts. The preliminary results of a larger research that had as one of its objectives to design and validate the content of a didactic proposal to enhance multimodal reading comprehension by integrating intercultural competence in school contexts with the integration of migrant students are reported. This study uses the quantitative method with a non-experimental and cross-sectional design. 12 class sessions were designed with their didactic material. 15 expert judges validated the proposal. The instrument used was a validation guideline built ad hoc for the research. For the analysis, the agreement of the judges was calculated using the relevance index, Aiken's V and Lawshe's content validity ratio. It was possible to obtain a coherent and consistent didactic proposal, which would allow it to be implemented in multicultural school contexts. A didactic proposal is obtained that addresses both the guidelines of intercultural competence and the didactics of language for the understanding of multimodal genres, considering the cultural identity of the students. It is considered that both perspectives in multicultural contexts can be approached at the same time without losing the development of understanding.

    Keywords: Intercultural competence, reading comprehension, multimodality, Cultural Diversity, Migration

    Received: 06 Oct 2024; Accepted: 11 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Mardones, Sotomayor and Escobar. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Tricia Mardones, Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences, Ñuñoa, Chile

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.