Cultural Understanding in EFL Reading in Argentina : Economic Impact, Disaster Management and Future Challenges

The importance of cultural perspectives for enhancing the comprehension of L2 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.