Cultural representations of Spanish speaking countries: a view of visual resources in the context of DE

Abstract

In view of the relevance of the discussion on culture in Applied Linguistics, both in the field of mother tongue education as well as in foreign language teaching, we address the dialogue on the subject to the teaching of Spanish in Distance Education (DE). With an eye on the Spanish Language Program of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in the DE mode, we aim to discuss the cultural representations of the Spanish-speaking countries in the images of the virtual environment of the Spanish Language I course. In accordance with the objective, we establish the following question: to what extent do the cultural representations in the analyzed images contribute to the deconstruction of reductionist and stereotyped conceptions about Spanish-speaking countries? The answer to this question comes from the analysis of the introductory images of the topics of the aforementioned course, based on theoretical bases of cultural studies, with special attention to the concepts of culture, identity and difference.