Developing intercultural awareness through literature in EFL contexts. How can the reading of literature develop EFL student’s intercultural awareness?

Sammanfattning: This research synthesis will attempt to answer the following question: How can reading of literature develop students’ intercultural awareness? We will investigate how the use of literature, and the benefits it may give, will lead to further developement of ICC and ID, which in turn leads to ICA. The notion of interculturality is mentioned through reference to both local and foreign culture in the Swedish curricula, and this coincides with our goal in showing how EFL-students can gain intercultural awareness and understanding of the world through the reading of this literature. We chose to use a combination of the following search words: interculturality, EFL, intercultural awareness, intercultural communicative competence, intercultural competence och intercultural dialogue, EFL and reading. In addition, we narrowed our search by focusing on studies conducted in upper-secondary school with EFL students. We believe that our findings will be beneficial to teachers and teacher-candidates interested in using narratives by non-native English speakers in the development of intercultural awareness in an EFL-context in Swedish upper secondary. We found that the use of intercultural literature could be beneficial in the development of EFL-students’ intercultural awareness. Therefore, our conclusion is that what we teach when we teach literature is more than just the English language.