Technological preferences for teaching-learning a second language in Huichol communities and private high-schools in Mexico

This research enquires about the Information and Communication Technologies preferences of students, teachers, and school principals in the teaching-learning process of a second language in 9^th grade in two settings: Spanish for the Huichol people in a remote rural area and English for a private school in the city. The first case is situated in a rural Huichol community in the high mountain area of Jalisco, Mexico. The second one is located in a wealthy neighborhood in the Western Metropolitan area of Mexico City. A qualitative methodology with a heuristic and ethnographic design to investigate the reality of the daily use of technologies in both contexts for learning a second language. The instruments were the participant observation and in-depth interviews. Among the key findings are: (a) the participants tend to favor the use of technology for second language learning, (b) the bandwidth and the speed of the Internet is crucial to strengthen the immersion into the culture of a second language, (c) Educational communities support electronic enquiring, (d) there are similarities in the preferred search engines between the two populations, (e) the equity of education is hindered by school desertions, and (f) educational innovation requires that similar investigations take place to foster a full performance in the society of knowledge.