During our teaching practice in public Secondary Schools located in Palmas -TO, which started nine years ago, it was noticeable that the students of this level have difficulties with text reading and interpretation in English.

We had noticed, through oral and written text interpretation activities, the students do not relate their previous knowledge to the subject under study and they do not notice that a lot of words are in fact cognates of Portuguese.

These difficulties can be due, on one hand, to the deficiency of the teaching methods used, lack or absence of authentic material, and/or difficulty for reproducing it, and, on the other hand, to the students; own indifference to the acquisition of a second language and their dependence on the use of the dictionary.

To deal with this problem, we chose to work with regional images known by the students and a text related to their socio-cultural context. Both the diversity of cultural and informative elements they present and the closer relationship to the students vision may facilitate pleasant reading and, possibly, a better understanding.

In order to accomplish this goal and try to answer to the question how can the image of known regional pictures facilitate the understanding of a text in English, we invited students from a secondary school to take part in some activities.

First, we explained our aims. Then, putting them into practice, we used transparent sheets with well-known pictures representing some words from a text and then proposed to perform an oral activity to check the text comprehension.

Those activities intended to facilitate the understanding of the text in English and tried to consolidate the new vocabulary. This work may be
important for teachers because the use of images as an instrument in the understanding of texts in the English Language can help students become more autonomous and involved in the teaching and learning process.

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