Extending reading research with a focus on cultural understanding and research on intercultural communication: An empirical investigation in Argentina

MELINA PORTO

Intercultural Education

Taylor & Francis Group

Año: 2014 p. 518 - 539

1467-5986

Revista indexada en (http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceji20#.VoFxdrZ97IU):Australian Education Index (AEI)Australian Research Council (ARC) Ranked Journal ListBritish Education IndexContents Pages in EducationEBSCOhost EJSEducational Research Abstracts online (ERA)Education Resources Information Center ( ERIC)ERIH (European Reference Index for the Humanities, Pedagogical and Educational Research) IBR (International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature on the Humanities and Social Sciences)Language and Linguistics Behavior AbstractsMLA International BibliographyMulticultural Education AbstractsNational Database for Research into International Education (NDRI)Periodica IslamicaResearch into Higher Education Abstracts and Sociological AbstractsSCOPUS®The work presented here is an empirical study of how advanced learners of English as a foreign language in Argentina access and understand the culture specific dimensions of literary narrative texts. It has three purposes. First, to extend research into reading in a foreign language to take account of the culture specific content of texts. Second, to extend the focus of research on intercultural communication to include the analysis of reading processes. Finally, to introduce an approach to the analysis of the cultural dimension of the reading process using a new model of levels of cultural understanding. It is argued that cultural understanding goes beyond the quantification of prior knowledge or background knowledge in the form of idea units as evidence of the comprehension process. In this sense, the proposed model succeeds in portraying a more detailed picture of cultural understanding in this setting.