Teaching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s "Americanah" in an English Foreign Language Classroom

Essay from the year 2019 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 12, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, course: Culture in the EFLC, language: English, abstract: Literature has always played an essential role in the EFLC. Students have always had to deal with complicated and challenging works of literature. And not only in their native language, but also in their second language. It is considered that in this way they can improve their competences and language skills. But it is also believed to raise intercultural awareness by reading, for example, African literature. Most of the literature that is chosen for being read in school consists of known classic literature such as Shakespeare, Goethe or other white and male writers. All you see in today's world is literature about love, about science fiction, and so on. African literature was not about that, of course there are a bunch of writings about that. But that's not the main theme of the literature. African literature is dealing mostly with situations or themes that occurred or are occurring in their culture. The first writings from that time were about slavery and especially about its suffering and the pain that slaves had to go through. It is mostly about the experience of living in a segregated society. This paper will examine how important African literature is. It has to be mentioned that African literature is not the only, but one of many possibilities of literature that can be used. Since it is not easy to discuss African literature in general, this essay will focus mainly on the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This book is meant to be representative for the African Literature. My teacher recommended this novel to us in my school days when we read Mother to Mother by Sindiwe Magona. This term paper will investigate the potential of this book