Melina Porto

Illustrated by an empirical study of English as a Foreign Language reading in Argentina, this book argues for a different approach to the theoretical rationales and methodological designs typically used to investigate cultural understanding in reading, in particular foreign language reading. It presents an alternative approach which is more authentic in its methods, more educational in its purposes, and more supportive of international understanding as an aim of language teaching in general and English language teaching in particular.

Illustrated by an empirical study of English as a Foreign Language reading in Argentina, this book argues for a different approach to the theoretical rationales and methodological designs typically used to investigate cultural understanding in reading, in particular foreign language reading. It presents an alternative approach which is more authentic in its methods, more educational in its purposes, and more supportive of international understanding as an aim of language teaching in general and English language teaching in particular.

The importance of cultural perspectives for enhancing the comprehension of A2 texts has been widely acknowledged by theorists and researchers in the field. This book reports part of the results of a broader study whose specific aim was to describe the comprehension of the cultural content of a literary narrative text through response writing tasks and visual reformulations. About 200 Argentine college students voluntarily participated in the study. The chosen selection to be read described a celebration in a Native American context from an outsider perspective. The difficulty this population revealed in approaching otherness manifested itself in the abundance of stereotyped perspectives about the Native Americans in the written tasks produced.