In this particular text type, understanding the content is essential as we need to provide precise and accurate instructions. As we are translating into L1, this stage will be the most problematic for students, so it is worth spending some time on it. Particular attention needs to be paid to the following lexical aspects:

• specific terminology related to food;
• specific terminology related to types of cooking;
• weight units;
• culture-specific items.

Depending on the level, the text type and the main aims of the session, this stage could be complemented with exercises that improve awareness of context, register, and style, and consolidate vocabulary, syntactical structures, etc. See Module 7, sections 7.2, 7.4 and 7.5, for reading strategies and activities to check understanding, which could be used for these purposes. The main difference here is that we are reading in order to produce subsequently a new text in a different language.

This text type is particularly representative of the use of pasiva refleja in Spanish. The reading and understanding phase will therefore help consolidate this structure.

As the main objective here is to achieve full understanding of the ST, you could also use questions, or ask students to produce a summary of the ST. For example: What type of meat do you need? What type of herbs do you put in? At what temperature should you cook it? Is sofreír a type of deep frying/ shallow frying/ boiling?

Remember to encourage your students to use both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, as well as other authentic texts in their preparation.