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.

With a Foreword by Hugh Starkey and Audrey Osler, and Afterwords by Graham Crookes, Hilary Janks and Allan Luke, this book promotes critical language education and illustrates how a critical agenda can be enacted in English language education in real classrooms. It presents four cases located in primary and secondary schools in the province of Buenos Aires in Argentina in contexts that can be characterised as vulnerable or difficult. It describes the possibilities, challenges and limitations of this critical agenda using students' drawings, posters, leaflets, artwork, classroom activities and conversational data as foundation, and including the voices of local teachers in their classrooms. Importantly, these teachers used teacher-made, locally produced, critical post-method materials, described by the author of those materials in one of the chapters. In this way, the book offers a unique balance of researcher, teacher and materials writer voices. These materials are included in the book and can help language teachers around the world to introduce critical perspectives in their specific contexts. The book is appealing to researchers, classroom teachers, teacher educators, and materials writers and developers interested in critical language education.

Text in Spanish. The objective of this study was to investigate the role of the cultural content of narrative texts with different perspectives on the process of lecture comprehension in a foreign language. More specifically, this project had three central objectives: to explore the influence of the outside perspective, "from the outside" or "outsider" (that is, with a narrator that is not from the represented culture) apart from the self-generating "from the inside" or "insider" (that is, with a narrator that is part of the represented culture) in the capture of the content of the narrative texts in L2; to describe the distinct cultural approach for each of the distinct perspectives; and to describe in detail the threshold of their own cultural awareness and of others during the lecture in L2 in various cases.

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.