Incorporating multicultural literature in English language teaching curriculum

This paper aims to examine the ways of incorporating multicultural literary texts in English language teaching curriculum to meet the needs of culturally diverse students. Teachers mainly use traditional reading strategies, therefore, they are not aware of, for example, Eurocentric biases which can be examined only by using postcolonial literary criticism. As a result, these teachers are not able to encourage their students to admit uncritically challenging representations of various cultural groups as they encounter these representations in their literary texts. Thus, teachers by using the postcolonial literary theory will lead their students to understand more effectively the representations of dominant and subaltern cultures to be found in both Eurocentric and postcolonial literary texts, and will achieve higher levels of multicultural literacy, which makes them more effective intercultural communicators. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.