Moving from ‘Making the Familiar Strange’ into ‘Making the Strange Familiar: Rethinking Literature’s Pedagogical Role in Promoting Intercultural Communicative Competence

Mahammedi, Imane Belkis

افاق للعلوم
Volume 11, Numéro 4, Pages 01-18
2026-09-10

Moving From ‘making The Familiar Strange’ Into ‘making The Strange Familiar: Rethinking Literature’s Pedagogical Role In Promoting Intercultural Communicative Competence

Abstract

This study critically evaluates the role of literature in teaching intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in EFL contexts, challenging the assumption that literary exposure inherently produces intercultural understanding. It seeks to debunk the myth of IC as a stable, measurable, and transferable skill, highlighting its conceptual, ideological, and pedagogical limitations. The paper reframes (ICC) as an ongoing, unstable, and ethically complex process, arguing that the role of literature in promoting it has been largely fantasized, and emphasizing that the main issue in our EFL classrooms is not understanding ‘the other’, but interrogating ‘the self’. It proposes classroom practices grounded in reflexivity and context sensitivity to engage learners in self-examination (making the familiar strange) before and while exploring ‘the other’ (making the strange familiar).

Keywords

ICC ; EFL ; Literature ; Self ; Other

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ص 96-112.

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pages 34-49.

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pages 229-240.

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Moving From ‘making The Familiar Strange’ Into ‘making The Strange Familiar: Rethinking Literature’s Pedagogical Role In Promoting Intercultural Communicative Competence

Abstract

Keywords

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