Promoting EFL Students’ Intercultural Awareness through Reading Literary Texts

The present article argues for the use of literary works as a valuable pedagogical tool to promote English foreign language (EFL) students' intercultural awareness.It aims to examine how reading literary texts can provide opportunities for promoting intercultural teaching/learning in an Algerian university context.To this purpose, the present paper first presents theoretical conceptions of intercultural teaching that inform this study, namely Byram's and Kramsch's models, and then discusses the role of literature in intercultural teaching/learning.This theoretical framework will then be used to develop some suggestions for teaching methodologies for enhancing EFL learners' intercultural understanding through literature.The approach proposed here is an aesthetic interactive reader-oriented approach which is complemented by the use of Hanauer's method focus-on-cultural understanding (2001a), as an efferent reading experience.A practical example of how to foster EFL students' intercultural learning through reading Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken", in an EFL teaching setting is provided.Insights gained from this teaching experience confirmed the potential of literature to raise EFL students' awareness of the influence of their cultural views on their interpretations.It enabled them to explore and come to terms with otherness and to engage in critical cross-cultural understanding.