Fostering Intercultural Competence in Norwegian ELT through reading Multimodal Young Adult Fiction - An analysis of internalized and institutional racism in Walter Dean Myers’ Monster and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give

Abstract

This thesis investigates Walter Dean Myers’ Monster (1999) and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (2017), in light of how these two multimodal young adult novels depict internalized and institutional racism through incorporating the concepts Double Consciousness and Counter-storytelling. Written from the narrative perspective of a young male and female African American protagonist belonging to different periods of recent US history, each novel in different ways immerses the reader into a storyworld which exposes the persistent racial disparity against African Americans in the American Justice System and Law Enforcement. Focusing on the two novels’ suitability for the English subject classroom in Norwegian Upper Secondary School, this thesis tries to connect the American field of Critical Race Theory with the emphasis on developing intercultural competence expressed in the English subject Curriculum in Norway. Using Hoff’s (2016) Model of the Intercultural Reader, the overall aim of this thesis is to explore the ways in which reading and working with multimodal young adult fiction could foster intercultural competence.