ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses the need to 'engage with the reality of language as experienced by users and learners' within culturally specific contexts. It aims to give voice to a local community in Latin America, in the city of La Plata in Argentina, in order to discover how a group of college students experience reading in English in a setting where English is a foreign language. The book is based on the notion of periphery acquires importance because the research, investigates reading in English as a foreign language (EFL) in a country in which Spanish has been the national and official language since the declaration of independence from Spain in 1816. Some studies which investigate the role of cultural background in text comprehension and use cultural differences as an independent variable focus on texts read in English as mother tongue, second language or foreign language.
