Developing cultural awareness through reading literary texts
Developing cultural awareness through reading literary texts

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates the role of literature in developing cultural awareness in ESL reading classes. The first part discusses the use of literary texts and ways of reading them in foreign language education. The study presented in the second part of the paper attempts to verify the effectiveness of Hanauer’s (2001) method of reading literary texts Focus-on-Cultural Understanding in developing cultural awareness, focusing on gender perception as one of fundamental aspects of culture. The study tested the participants’ attitudes and motivation before and after the controlled reading activity of a culturally loaded text. Despite its limitations, the study confirmed the effectiveness of Hanauer’s method in developing cultural understanding.

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