A SLA curriculum proposal for Cotacachi indigenous families that work in community ecotourism

Abstract

The idea of the present thesis work appeared around two years ago when the Weilbauer Museum Director of the PUCE told me about the Runa Tupari Project. Some students of the PUCE had the opportunity to do research and fieldwork on other areas of this well known based community tourism project in such areas as in microenterprise, tourism product development, etc; and, being myself a tourism professional and having finishing the Masters classes, I wondered about how English is taught in these communities that devote themselves to tourism in Ecuador. In fact when I had the first informal interview with the director of Runa Tupari project in Otavalo, he expressed his concern about the lack of basic communication in English, especially between host families and non-Spanish speaker visitors, situation that reduced the quality of the entire touristic service and that have been the cause of pitiful misunderstandings.