The intercultural approach in reading activities present in textbooks for the teaching of english to teenagers (level a1)

Abstract

This work presents a research project carried out at the Instituto de Formación Docente Continua San Luis. It aimed at analyzing and describing, in terms of the Intercultural Approach, reading activities found in textbooks published for the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language-culture (level A1), available in Argentina. The research was exploratory descriptive and followed a qualitative logic. Due to data saturation, the sample was made up of the reading sequences present in the first three units in seven textbooks. The results show that the inclusion of the Intercultural Approach has a secondary, superficial role in the reading activities analyzed, and that it does not work cross-curricularly. It also suggests that language and culture are presented as dissociated entities. The activites promoting the Intercultural Communicative Competence are personalization and search-for-information activities, and tend to be unidirectional, without promoting intercultural reflection.