Foreign language learning confronts learners with the challenge of constructing new representations of other cultures and, in the process, of questioning representations of their own. In order to learn a foreign language we must first learn how to construct new representations of other cultures, and in the process, we must also learn how to revise our representations of our own culture. Yet there are few systematic approaches to this critical aspect of language learning. In this article we show how the teacher can use texts to confront learners with cultural representations. The four texts selected represent various types of discourse, a literary extract, a student essay, an advertising document and a newspaper article. The approaches which are illustrated borrow from stylistics, linguistics, and discourse analysis. The process of analysing the various representations which can be elicited from a text is presented as a possible way of increasing cultural awareness.