Intercultural encounters through picturebooks in EFL-teaching with young learners

Intercultural encounters (IEs) are essential for the development of intercultural competence (IC). Hence the teaching of English should include
possibilities for students to engage in such encounters. However, it is not always feasible to set up face-to-face IEs in the young learner classroom and
some research indicates that such encounters may lead to othering (Piipponen & Karlsson, 2019, p. 591). It is acknowledged in the Council of Europe’s
Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters ((Barrett and Byram, 2022), that an alternative to real-life encounters is encounters with cultural others
through images. It is also theoretically suggested (Hoff, 2016) and empirically supported (e.g., Sindland & Birketveit, 2020), that encounters with texts,
including literary texts, can be fruitful for the development of IC. Picturebooks constitute one form of literary text, which by definition contain images,
that is especially suitable for teaching foreign languages to YLs and Bland (2016) suggests that they might serve as an alternative to stereotypical
cultural representations found in some didactic teaching materials. In this presentation, which presents some of the findings from a PhD-project, it is
suggested that carefully selected picturebooks can create affordances for IEs in the EFL-YL classroom thus contributing to the development of IC from
116 an early age. The presentation includes a qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2014) of two picturebooks which, drawing on a non-essentialist view
of culture (Holliday, 2011), seeks to identify potential IEs in these books. The presentation also includes examples of some of the IEs learners engaged
in during teaching sequences based on these picturebooks. The classroom study was conducted as a qualitative case study (Creswell, 2012) and data
was collected in two schools with students 8-10 years old. The students participated in two teaching sequences based on a picturebook and planned
in collaboration with teachers. A didactic framework based on models for teaching the cultural dimension in foreign language education was applied.
Recommendations for practice are that teaching based on carefully selected picturebooks can and should be integrated into an EFL-YL curriculum
which aims at engaging students in IEs as one way of supporting the development of their IC.