On Strategies for Teaching Culturally Diverse Literary Texts

This paper discusses strategies for developing students’ cross-cultural literature appreciation abilities. It aims at facilitating students’ cultural understanding of literary texts by demonstrating the current approaches of literature teaching practice. For nearly half a century, research has been conducted on learning and understanding literature from a variety of cultures. With the ever growing trend of globalization and modernization, it becomes more and more common to see teaching and learning practices on literature that are different from the teachers’ and the students’ cultural backgrounds. Over the last 50 years, the dominant educational method for literature teaching and learning has been biographical and formalist criticism (Christenbury, 2000; Karolides, 2000). With the goal of identifying the common features of literary works from different cultural traditions, the two critical approaches promote a detached and pre-determined understanding of the nature of the meaning of literary texts, and they advocate an objective approach to analyzing literature (Christenbury, 2000; Karolides, 2000). Formalism and biographical criticism approaches guide students to understand the literature through comprehensive analysis of textbased information and identification of historical or bibliographical background in literary works. However, they have neglected the fact that literature comprehension involves readers’ participation, which further includes the active understanding of cultural elements from the text as well as from the influences of their native culture. Definition of Culture Different scholars have different understandings of culture. According to Tapp (2007), “culture is a set of learned beliefs and behaviors shaping how members view and experience the world” (p. 45). Robbins, Fantone, Hermann, Alexander, and Zweifler (1998) stated that individuals bring their cultures of affiliation. In these scholars’ perspective, cultures of affiliation may include in part religious groups, ethnic groups, social classes, and voluntary and professional organizations they have come to embrace (Robbins et al.,1998). According to Philipsen (1987), “a culture can be viewed from many perspectives, each of which provides one partial but important glance at the nature of things cultural” (p.76). In Goodenough’s (1964) views, culture does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them. Robinson (1985) viewed cultural understanding as “an ongoing, dynamic process in which learners continually synthesize cultural inputs with their own past and present experience in order to create meaning—a synthesis between the learner’s home culture, the target culture input, and the learner as an individual” (pp. 11-12). From the definition cited above, different scholars defined culture in different perspectives. However, the common ground of their definition is based on associating culture