Broken Orientalism: Using literary texts for intercultural training

This study starts from the assumption that intercultural training with literary texts should have a clearly defined position in foreign language teaching and learning, and that this could facilitate the deconstruction of orientalist perspectives in contemporary political and media discourse. However, the marginalisation of intercultural objectives, methodology and methods in curricula, teacher training and course books that themselves reveal orientalist features demonstrate a long-lasting practical negligence in an area that has been at the forefront of foreign language research in the last two decades. In the short and medium term, this enormous gap between theory and practice could partially be addressed by replacing inadequate sections in course books with literary work, using texts such as The Persian Dinner that have been successfully brought into a foreign language environment at Higher Education level in Cambridge. However, intercultural training in other subject areas than foreign languages will have to support this temporary solution until substantially revised curricula and teacher training programmes start guiding authors and publishers to develop more adequate teaching and learning material.