Language learners’ representations of Portugal: implications for culture teaching / Las representaciones de Portugal de los estudiantes de portugués: implicaciones en la enseñanza de aspectos culturales

Abstract

This pedagogically-oriented study investigated cultural representations of Portugal held by 29 learners of Portuguese in a large public university in Malaysia. The main purpose of this study was to demonstrate how these representations could be employed for teaching the cultural component of the Portuguese language programme. During the content analysis, representations of Portugal provided by the respondents were divided into 11 categories. The study then assessed salience and favourability of each category of images. The findings revealed that the language learners’ representations of Portugal were for the most part positive. The images referring to Portuguese people formed the largest and most salient category. Overall, the students’ representations of Portugal tended to be simplistic and included ubiquitous stereotypes. A discussion of pedagogical implications arising from these findings concludes the article.