Starting from the premises that English-language Young Adult (YA) fiction can be used in the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classroom in order to help enhance an awareness of socio-cultural aspects of English-speaking cultures, 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 story is a first-person narrative about Josephine growing up within the two worlds of the Italian-Australian and the mainstream Australian community. As Rhonda Bunbury (1996:240-252) points out, the ‘other’ in Looking for Alibrandi is not Josephine’s Italian self as a member of an ethnic minority. The ‘Other’ is rather the ethnic Anglo-Australian majority. Thus, the implied readers of the book are the mainstream majority as well as the Australian minorities.

Since meaning is determined by cultural context, cultural as well as linguistic factors have to be considered when using YA fiction in the EFL-classroom. Drawing on work within reader-response theories, I examine how the contexts in which cultural indeterminacies appear contribute to their meaning. The implied reader is related to readers in a proliferated context of receiving, that is readers in the lower secondary EFL-classroom in Finland (with Swedish as their native language).

A few key examples (such as personal names, food, school and education) of the types of features that may reveal something interesting about the mainstream Australian or Italian-Australian cultures are examined. Some of these examples may have the potential to cause EFL-readers problems. The analysis of the key examples shows that we need to formulate strategies to help EFL-readers overcome problems caused by culturally specific aspects. EFL-readers also have to be reminded of the fact that cultural aspects depicted in a work of fiction may or may not correspond to the cultural reality outside the written text. Since no novel can cover the whole range of sub-cultures that exists within a culture, the study of only one Australian novel is not enough for EFL-students to get familiar with the alien in Australian culture. But it can serve a ‘gateway’ to unexplored places. Such gateways offer rich opportunities for cultural meetings within the EFL-classroom.

Back to: IRSCL Conference Programme