Florencia Figini ffigini@email.unsl.edu.
ar
Chapter Abstract
EFL Courses at Universidad Nacional de San Luis, Argentina: A proposal
from a Genre Pedagogy perspective
Courses of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are part of the curriculum in
most programs in public universities in Argentina. In most cases, these courses
are designed to focus on the development of reading comprehension skills of
academic and specialized texts related to the professional or scientific field of
each study program. At Universidad Nacional de San Luis (UNSL), in EFL Courses
designed for study programs in the field of health, that is, the programs that
offer graduate degrees in Nursing, Kinesiology, Nutrition, and Phonoaudiology 1
for the Faculty of Health, we approach reading comprehension activities as part
of “genre transposition” projects. These projects focus on contextualizing
reading comprehension activities through the use of texts in English that
circulate within the academic and/or professional communities of each of the
above mentioned fields as source of scientific knowledge that is transposed into
a different text in Spanish to communicate to a different audience and with a
different purpose.
Our work is framed by the notion of genre as developed within the Systemic
Functional Linguistics tradition.
In our particular context, the capacity to communicate in English of the students
enrolled in our courses is varied. The EFL courses are located in the third, fourth
or fifth year of the Nursing, Kinesiology, Nutrition, and Phonoaudiology
programs, respectively, which means that students are, sometimes, starting to
familiarize with academic and scientific disciplinary texts. The texts we use as
reading material in our courses are in English, but the language of instruction is
Spanish.
The aim of this work is to show how contextual elements of texts in English –as
social purpose, intended audience and author, other related genres– shapes the
design of reading comprehension activities into tasks that include and connect
contextual and textual elements of different academic or professional texts and
that are relevant for students´ communicative academic activities or that pertain
to their future professional field of work.
1
In Argentina, degrees in Phonoaudiology include areas that are separated in other countries: speech
and language therapy and audiology.
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