The sociocultural component in the ELE classroom in the Ivory Coast

In many countries of the world, the process of teaching/learning foreign languages often encounters a very limited research landscape, both in number and scope of contributions, especially in the conception, implementation and manipulation of textbooks. The didactics of Spanish as a foreign language does not escape this reality in Côte d'Ivoire, the country with the most learners of Spanish in all of West Africa. Therefore, it was necessary to shed light on the treatment of the sociocultural component in the ELE materials in use in that country.Through this study of four cases in two public schools in Abidjan, we have been able to verify the neglect of the sociocultural component as a teaching/learning content of ELE in Ivorian classrooms.The study was carried out by means of classroom observation, interviews with four teachers of Spanish as a foreign language in these classrooms, an evaluation of the students by means of a questionnaire adapted to each level and the analysis of a corpus of four curricular materials integrating the two textbooks in force in these courses and the related educational programs.