ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces data based on the texts in English, a foreign language in the authors' context. It shows that the students relied on familiar knowledge and experiences in their understanding of the texts by engaging in processes of comparing and contrasting. However, the processes of comparing and contrasting resulted in the adoption of different and multiple perspectives in the understanding of the cultural as the participants positioned themselves as critical and reflective readers. When participants felt an emotional commitment to certain text topics, they favoured them in their productions. The chapter describes Victoria's lengthy reading response on the topic of domination in the Navajos text. It shows standardised instruments to test comprehension for research purposes and also for pedagogic purposes include recall tasks, multiple choice tests, probed recall, inference questions, open-ended questions, sentence completions, true/false, summaries and cloze tests, but they focus on the memory factor, exact recall and the quantity of understanding.
