Fostering Interculturality in Foreign Language Teaching: Literature in a Chinese Language Classroom

Since its earlier theorizations in the 1990s, interculturality has gained increasing prominence in the field of foreign language pedagogy. Interculturality calls for the acquisition of a complex set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that makes any separation between language and culture in foreign language teaching untenable. This article examines the potential of literature for an intercultural approach to Chinese language teaching in Italian upper secondary school, also known as ‘high school’. A reflection on what constitutes Chinese culture and the place of literature in the teaching of Chinese provides the background against which an empirical pedagogical experiment is presented. The teaching experience involves the use of a Chinese authentic literary text to promote an intercultural approach to two seemingly unrelated topics: Chinese New Year travel rush and sexual harassment. The activity shows the affordance of literature for developing an intercultural approach to diversity and complexity beyond simplification and orientalizing epistemologies.