Resumen en español

The project of this work was to design and evaluate a didactic sequence for the development of reading in a context of English for Academic Purposes (life sciences undergraduate programs) at Universidad del Valle. This work was carried out considering three main phases: a needs analysis phase that aimed at establishing a characterization of the target students group, secondly, a design phase through which the treatment of two main conceptual frames, content and genre-based approaches to the study of written texts was set to be the core for this project and finally, a third phase in which an evaluation of the design results was effectuated by specialized revisers. In this manner, this work offers a clear overview of the particularities that are rooted to very specific social groups in terms of language teaching and learning; these particularities are taken into account through the implementation of the approaches considered here; a genre-approach that capitalizes the orientations of an academic group with special discursive characteristics and a content approach that synthetizes the terminological and conceptual frames into which English teaching efforts are comprised. Thus, these design results exhibit a model of lesson organization in which figures for structural analysis called “rhetorical functions” are introduced as a mechanism to examine specific textual frames in specific study fields, namely, life sciences textbooks.