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chool and the language classroom. Facts are important in the process of building up knowledge. Over the past decades, however, textbooks have perhaps contained too little factual knowledge. Methodology has focused more on how to develop communicative skills from what might seem a bare minimum of cultural facts, and these facts have been mainly concerned with the everyday lives of representatives of the foreign language community, to a large extent the everyday lives of young people. In a misunderstood attempt to engage and motivate young learners, textbook authors have constructed a large number of texts about discotheques and hobbies, texts without conflict, which many learners find boring. Might it not be that this age group is more interested in the unknown and exotic than in their own lives and their own problems? It is difficult to decide whether a particular age group is interested in specific topics; the main aim must be to present learners with a variety of texts in a variety of genres so that there might be something for most learners to identify with in one way or another. Paintings, photographs, music and written texts should, for the reasons I have suggested, to a large extent be authentic. There is a vast difference between a text relating or describing a specific phenomenon in the foreign culture, written by a foreign textbook author seen with the foreigner's eyes, and the text on the same topic written for children or young people within the native culture. Either point of view is of interest, but inter-cultural awareness depends on a knowledge of both. It is difficult to state what specific topics should be represented in foreign language textbooks in order to form the basis for the development of cultural awareness. Any end-determined list will be reductionist and limiting. Still, I find it necessary to state that both writers and users of textbooks need to be aware of the fact that texts represent not only content and form, but also a personal representation, either by a foreign language writer or a native speaker. In addition the reader's personal interpretation of the text within his or her own 'horizon' constitutes the outcome of the reading or listening process. Literature and other authentic texts The literary text has been greatly underestimated in recent foreign language learning. It represents the personal voice of a culture and, secondly, a voice that young people can easily identify with. The communicative approach to foreign language learning has, to a certain extent, disregarded the literary text as a potential for learning language and encountering the foreign culture. I believe there are three main reasons for this. First, there is the fact that literature is traditionally associated with bourgeois, elitist culture and has been defined by methodologists as an artefact outside the 'real world' of young learners. Secondly, it is due to the way 'culture' was defined in foreign language teaching at the time the communicative approach developed, namely as the everyday lives of representatives of the foreign culture. Focus was thus on how to behave in everyday social situations. Thirdly, part of the reason can be found in prevailing Anglo-American literary theory in the 1960s and 70s, in 'New Criticism', with its focus on the text itself, not on biographical information as previously, nor on the interrelationship between text and reader and the reader as co-producer of meaning. The close read