Familiarizing the Alien: Young Adult Fiction in the EFL-classroom

Lilian Rönnqvist

Learning a new language can seem like setting out on a journey to unfamiliar places. Various means of conveyance can be chosen, and the one most commonly used in the language classroom is still the language textbook. However, textbooks are never able to give more than a superficial overview of the significant features of a specific culture. In order for the learners to get a deeper understanding of words, concepts and cultural phenomena encountered on the journey, supplementary means of conveyance are needed. One example of these supplementary vehicles is works of fiction written in the target language.

Having worked as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) for nearly twenty years, I have found that the reading of Young Adult (YA) fiction can help enhance an awareness of socio-cultural aspects of English speaking cultures. But since the implied reader of such novels is in the first instance a native speaker, they might take too much socio-cultural knowledge for granted, and offer too few explanations. These gaps as well as possible culture bumps will be problematic for a foreign reader. According to Carol M. Archer (1986), a culture bump occurs when an individual is expecting one kind of behaviour but is confronted with a norm that is somehow different. Unlike culture shock, which continues over an extended period of time, culture bumps are usually very brief, though the effect may be long-lasting. I use the term to refer to those moments during reading when readers are jolted by a cultural feature with which they are unfamiliar. They pause for an instant, and then will generally read on.

In using the dichotomy non-native versus native speakers, I am aware of the fact that being a native speaker of English does not grant a full understanding of each aspect in an English-language novel. Cultural differences, for example, can be great in spite of the use of the same language, since English is spoken as a first language by people all over the world, whose cultural backgrounds vary enormously. That is why we cannot fall into the trap of thinking that cultural acquisition is only a problem for non-native readers. Novels set in or with strong connections to a sub-culture within a majority culture may therefore offer both native and non-native readers an insight into the cultural norms of a particular group within a particular society.

In this paper, I examine the way in which one particular YA novel, Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992), might introduce Finland-Swedish teenagers to the cultural milieu of the Italian-Australian community in Sydney. The author is a third generation Italian-Australian who wrote the book when she was less than ten years older than her Italian-Australian protagonist, Josephine, who is seventeen. The story is a first-person narrative about Josephine growing up between the two worlds of the Italian-Australian community and the Australian mainstream. As pointed out by Rhonda Bunbury (1996), the "other" in Looking for Alibrandi is not the other represented by a member of an ethnic minority, since the main protagonist is Josephine herself. Rather, the other is the mainstream Anglo-Australian majority. Thus, the implied readers of the book belong to the mainstream majority as well as to Australian minorities. From an EFL-teaching perspective, this is an interesting aspect in that EFL-readers in Finland can be related to several categories of native readers. As much as there is a great variety of native readers, there is also a great variety of EFL-readers in Finland.

The term ‘EFL-reader’ is used to describe 13-16-year-old lower-secondary students of English as a foreign language who live in Finland but have Swedish as their first language. Some of the students may not, in fact, have Swedish as their first language, but they have still chosen to go to a school where the language of instruction is Swedish. (Swedish is one of the country’s two official languages and is spoken by a minority of merely six percent. In the city of Turku (Åbo), where I myself am based, many Swedish-speaking Finns are actually bilingual).

Looking for Alibrandi has certain features which make it particularly valuable for use in an EFL-setting in Finland. Firstly, its Australian orientation will make a welcome change from Finnish EFL-teachers’ more usual emphasis on the cultures of Britain and the United States. Secondly, the themes and issues in Looking for Alibrandi, such as sexuality, gender, the search for identity, and school life, are those with which EFL-readers of this age group can identify. Thirdly, the subject matter of this book is appropriate for Finland-Swedish EFL-students, because Josephine’s dilemma, being torn as she is between minority and mainstream, will have a special ring.

However, Looking for Alibrandi is packed with potential cultural bumps, far more than could be mentioned in a paper of this length. Thus for my purpose here, it is sufficient to select a few key examples. I shall be looking at the particular interface between Josephine’s culture and my own students’ culture as Swedish-speaking Finns. In particular, what differences might there be in the understanding of school and education.

In the novel, questions to do with school life and education in general have a central place, mainly because Josephine is spending her last year at high school. For a start, the text mentions a fair number of different schools by name. These schools are in themselves fictional, I have discovered, but the mention of their names is in a sense "truthful", in that it does capture something of Australian education’s sociocultural range. Certainly most Australian readers will guess that a school named after a saint - St Martha’s, St Anthony’s, St Francis - are Catholic private schools, whereas Cook High and Glebe High are state schools.

For EFL-students from Turku/Åbo, however, school names starting with St would not call forth an image of a Catholic school. St Olofsskolan in Turku, for example, is just an ordinary state comprehensive school, even though the name alludes to pre-Reformation times, when a monastery named after St Olof actually stood on the same site. In Finland, generally, private schools are few, most of them receiving a state subsidy. Here, then, is something for me as a teacher to check up on. Are my students picking up enough clues to realise that there is a cultural difference here?

Apart from Catholic schools, there are also other kinds of Australian private schools, some of them connected with Protestant churches. Marchetta mentions a private co-ed, for instance. My own students might well wonder why it should even be necessary to mention that a school is co-ed, since in Finland, all schools are co-ed nowadays, that is educating boys and girls together.

Josephine goes to a private Catholic school, where education is strongly influenced by Catholic Christian tradition. The teachers are nuns, and once a term there is confession. As regards the symbolism of the rosary, for example, the book’s non-Catholic readers may need some help, quite irrespective of their own native language, whereas Catholic readers who are not native speakers of English may immediately get the point because of their common frames of reference (provided that they have learnt the linguistic meaning of the term ‘rosary’).

On the other hand, when we are familiarized with something alien in somebody else’s culture, we may also start to think about our own. As a matter of fact, Finnish state schools are connected with the Lutheran church, which is one of Finland’s two state churches (the much smaller one being the Greek Orthodox). This means, for example, that many schools start their school year with a visit to church, a custom which is more or less taken for granted. It is only when we encounter a different, or alien, custom, like school confession, that we perhaps realise that our own practices, whether religious or secular, are no more "natural" than anybody else’s. This kind of issue provides fruitful points for discussion and opportunities for "talk", especially if such talk takes place in the foreign language.

Another point about the different kinds of Australian schools is the link to social class. St Martha’s, referred to as a private high school run by the Catholic Education Office, has some scholarship places for girls from less affluent background. Josephine has worked hard to win one of these, but says "it backfired on me because I ended up going to a school I didn’t like" (Marchetta 1992:7). She feels she does not really belong because the school is "dominated by rich people", "mostly Anglo-Saxon Australians, who I can’t see having a problem in the world", and "rich Europeans", who have money, but are "grocers or builders, mainly labourers" (Marchetta 1992:6). Josephine would rather be the daughter of a rich labourer than a scholarship student. But most of all she wants to belong to "the world of sleek haircuts and upper-class privileges" (Marchetta 1992:32). At this point I as a teacher may have to suggest that a preoccupation with class and an aspiration to upward social mobility need not necessarily be typical of Australians or Italian-Australians in general. An important task for the teacher would be to alert the students to the ironies which can come with unreliable narrators. Something that can be interpreted as representative of a specific culture may, in fact, only be an expression of the narrator’s perception. But even so, the introduction of class aspects contributes to the story in that it shows the complex structure of any society. In order to grasp it, EFL-readers will need to understand the Australian class distinctions. Or if they pick up enough clues to be able to grasp the story on their own, their understanding of Australian class distinctions may improve as a result.

St Martha’s is situated in the eastern suburbs, which according to several textual clues belong to the middle-class and upper-class parts of Sydney. Josephine had wanted to go to a school in the "inner west", to which all her friends from primary school had gone. What she says about the difference this would have made for her is very revealing of her situation. As a student of the inner west school, she would have been with people she could have related to, people who having had the same strict Italian upbringing as she herself, "knew what it meant not to be allowed to do something" (Marchetta 1992:7).

At one point Jacob Coote, a boy at Cook High, takes Josephine home from a school dance. This episode offers the readers a chance to become familiar with the connotations attached to the various types of schools in the novel. Cook High is socially on "the wrong side of the tracks", but since Jacob and Josephine are both middle class, Jacob guesses that if Josephine were not a scholarship student at an upper class school, she too would be at Cook High. Of course not, she says. She would be at a Catholic school in any case, but since there are class distinctions between Catholic schools as well, she would be at "a middle-class Catholic school equivalent to Cook High", and Josephine insists, she would not be ashamed of it either (Marchetta 1992:62).

Episodes like these are replete with socio-cultural implications, and once again the question is: Will my own students get the message? In order to pick up the clues, they may need to have a conscious method, which I as a teacher ought to help them develop. Rather than relying on my own explanations, I can ask my students to compare themselves with Sherlock Holmes. This is an idea I got from reading Arthur Asa Berger (1999), who points out that Sherlock Holmes, is "a master semiotician, who understands signs and what they can tell to the one who knows how to "read" them". In "The Blue Carbuncle", for instance, Dr Watson was incapable of arriving at the same conclusions as Sherlock Holmes, because he thought that what he saw was trivial and of no importance. What Watson lacked was a systematic way of looking for the underlying significance of the seemingly trivial. But, as Berger also says, signs may lie and "because the relationship that exists between a signifier and signified is arbitrary, interpreting signs involves a good deal of skill" (Berger 1999:21). Also, the way one interprets a sign is closely connected to conventions and expectations within some particular historical phase of a particular culture. In John Stephen’s words (1992:13), "all speakers can share a sense of what a signifier denotes, but some speakers may be unfamiliar with particular connotations or implications". This explains why some culturally specific signs unfamiliar to the reader of a specific novel may be interpreted according to the readers’ own cultural key. Foreign language students need to be alerted to this possibility, so that they will catch themselves in the act, as it were, and begin to wonder whether some other set of norms may apply.

For example, without contextual clues, implications of class belonging as connected to what kind of school a person attends would probably pass unnoticed by my EFL-readers, because class differences are not overtly expressed in Finland. Here, the teacher’s role as a mediator between the novel and the students is important. However, when studying a book like Looking for Alibrandi in an EFL-class, the teacher’s task would also be to help the students become aware of the risk of generalisation. To prevent students from drawing over-hasty conclusions from the story as told by Josephine, tasks and assignments need to be formulated in a way that encourage the students to reflect on what they are reading. These kinds of assignments do not have to be more complicated than, for example, a question highlighting the fact that, irrespective of the prevailing value system in a specific culture, all individuals have their own private aspirations at different stages in life. An analysis of Josephine as a fictive character, discussing whether she is depicted as a flat or round character, for example, may help the students to read the signs given in the text. One of the assignments may be formulated like this: "What are Josephine’s goals in life? Do they change during the course of the novel? If so, in what way and why? How much do you think she is affected by the society around her?"

Questions such as these encourage the EFL-readers to locate the fictive character in a larger context that may contain both similarities and differences which they recognize and understand. The examples should give evidence for and support to the arguments put forward by the students, and enable the teacher to track the students’ responses to specific issues in the novel related to a larger context. In this way, the formulation of the tasks and assignments would help provide the students with a methodology to read the signs in the text. In other words, they would be encouraged to become a bit more Holmesian: systematically to search for codes of interpretation which are different from the ones they know best. An obvious difference, such as the fact that in Australia schoolchildren wear school uniforms whereas in Finland school uniforms are quite unknown, is seldom a problem. But other things, though very significant, may simply escape notice. For instance, even the kind of schoolwork Australian children do may be very un-Finnish. But my students may not reflect on this, precisely because they were not expecting a difference. Until they have learnt to de-naturalise their own cultural preconceptions, a school is a school and that is that, regardless of where it is.

In Looking for Alibrandi there are numerous examples of other concepts ‘alien’ to EFL-readers in the ways and contexts they are used. As for EFL-teachers, they have to be realistic. With a clear sense of the precise cultural interface at which they are working, they will also have some sense of degrees of difficulty. For reading a novel, the question is always: What are these particular students likely to find transparent or opaque or simply incognizable (impossible to understand) in this particular book? This question has to do with the way particular readers are likely to operate their own stores of knowledge at the interface between their own and the "other" cultural world. Whether a concept is transparent, opaque or incognizable is determined both by the context in which it appears and by the reader’s prior knowledge.

On the whole, a cultural analysis of this novel confirms the complexity of culture as a phenomenon. As represented in literature, culture cannot be seen as something that is either - or. In fiction, just as in real life, mental representations of culture emerge gradually alongside with social representations. The attitudes and values lying behind peoples’ behaviour are ‘unmasked’ only in closer contact with them, whether they be people in real life or characters in a novel. So what we learn about an alien culture through reading literature really can be compared to what we learn about a foreign culture when we travel, but travellers can sometimes be rather passive observers, just as readers too can be passive readers. It is the EFL-teacher’s task, in the combined role of a co-traveller, a guide and a mediator to formulate assignments and tasks that activate the readers and prompt them to draw inferences and think for themselves.

However, in setting out on the journey to foreign cultures as represented in a literary work, it is important to be conscious of the danger of generalizing about a whole society on the basis of a single literary text. No novel will completely cover the whole range of sub-cultures that exist within a culture, and even within our own culture, we are ‘outsiders’ to many sub-cultures. That is why the study of only one Australian novel is not enough for the students to get familiar with the alien in Australian culture. But it can serve as a "gateway" to unexplored places. Such gateways offer rich opportunities for cultural encounters within the EFL-classroom.

References:

Archer, M. C. (1986). Culture bump and beyond, in J. M. Valdes (Ed.), Culture bound: Bridging the cultural gap in language teaching (pp. 170-178). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Marchetta, M. (1992). Looking for Alibrandi. Ringwood,Australia: Penguin Books.

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Rönnqvist, L.,& Sell R.D (1995). Teenage books in foreign language education for the middle school, in Sell R. D. (Ed.), Literature throughout foreign language education: The implications of pragmatics (pp. 40-73). London: Modern English Publication in association with the British Council.

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