Reading South Africa as an Adolescent

Current literature from South Africa reflects some of the country’s vast cultural diversity and helps illustrate many of the challenges associated with struggles for equality, against the background of a painful and continuing history fraught with injustices. This article makes an argument for engaging with these literary texts in the secondary EFL classroom and proposes a reading of five contemporary texts featuring young adult protagonists. Taking a combined context-reader approach, it contends that such texts are not only conducive to rich cultural learning, but also to personal development at learners’ particular stages of self-formation. Involving themselves in some of South Africa’s historical, cultural, and moral complexities through literary texts offers adolescent learners a lens through which to view, reflect on, and potentially validate and consolidate some of their own multifaceted, possibly contradictory experiences, as selves-in-progress within their own diverse social contexts, and it provides language with which to do so.