The worlds of work: a critical intercultural approach to labor issues in a Brazilian series of textbooks on Spanish as a foreign language

Abstract

The intercultural approach, in foreign language teaching, consists of thinking about educational practices that demonstrate the relationship between language and culture, from and towards a critical perspective of social processes. In this way, school materials can be great allies in the development of this approach. The article proposes to reflect on the potencial of some pedagogical activities, incorporated in a Brazilian Spanish foreign language textbooks series, to promote an alternative treatment of labor issues. This study, through a qualitative approach, is based on the analytical strategies framed in the area of the Multimodal Discourse Analysis. The main findings demonstrated how the articulations of verbal and visual semiotic resources demand from the student reflexives tasks that attend to an intercultural and critical teaching about the topic of work.