What is it about?
Not much is known about intercultural learning, a crucial aspect of learning an additional languge, in the primary English language classroom. It is suggested that one way to support such learning is through encountering complex and multifaceted characters in picturebooks, a particularly well-suited resource for teaching children. This paper explores young learners' intercultural learning through teaching in two picturebooks which had been purposefully selected for their potential to engage learners in intercultural encounters.
Featured Image
Photo by Jess Zoerb on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Children today live in an interconnected world, through technology, shared challenges such as growing inequality, and classrooms are in many contexts, becoming increasingly diverse. Navigating this complexity requires intercultural understanding ,which includes respect for, empathy with and curiosity towards cultural others as well as understanding of one self. Language education can play an important role in developing the relevant competences required for being, and becoming, intercultural citizens. Encountering cultural others through literary fiction, such as picturebooks, and becoming aware of both similarities and differences beween oneself and others is one way to support intercultural learning from an early age in a way that is both appropriate, meaningful and feasible in the classroom.
Perspectives
My aim with this paper is to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and to contribute to an important, yet under-researched field. I hope that I, by attempting to shine a light on what may constitute an intercultural encounter for children, including the fact that perceived cultural difference and similarity is most often subjective, not necessarily determined by obvious categories such as nationality, and shaped by our own identities and life experience, can inspire teaching that focuses less on that which separates us and more on our shared humanity,
Karoline Soegaard
University College Copenhagen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Intercultural encounters through two picturebooks in the lower primary EFL classroom in Denmark, Language Teaching for Young Learners, October 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/ltyl.00056.sog.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
