Fostering the interculturally competent reader in the EFL classroom: an analysis of the teaching material accompanying literary texts in 10th grade textbooks and teacher’s book.

Abstract

The present master’s thesis is written within the field of English didactics and investigates how 10th grade English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks and accompanying teacher’s book have the potential to foster learners’ intercultural competence (IC). In today’s world we encounter and interact with people from various background, who holds different beliefs and values than ourselves, more than ever before. These meetings often occur through travels, social media or in everyday life in multicultural societies. Intercultural competence is considered to be necessary for fruitful collaboration across cultures. The nature of foreign language (FL) literary texts provides the opportunity to meet and communicate with literary voices from various cultural, social and historical contexts, and it is thus a suited medium for intercultural exploration. The principal research aim of the present study is to explore how EFL textbooks and an accompanying teacher’s book have the potential to help foster intercultural learning through working with English literature. With a qualitative study, this thesis has examined how the teaching material following literary texts facilitate the elements defined in Hild Elisabeth Hoff’s (2016) model of the Intercultural Reader (MIR). The two textbooks and accompanying teacher’s book chosen for this project were Aschehoug’s Stages 10 (Pettersen & Røkaas, 2021) and Cappelen Damm’s Engelsk 10 Student’s Book and Engelsk 10 Teacher’s Book (Haegi et al., 2021a/b). The study found that the learning tasks from the two textbooks and the complementary content from the teacher’s book have the potential to challenge learners to critically analyse and reflect on the complexities of literary texts from various different points of view. The analysis further revealed that the extent to which ‘intercultural readers’ are fostered varied a great deal depending on the textbook, and that the elements described by the MIR (Hoff, 2016) had different representation in the investigated material.