Russophone literature for the development of intercultural competence in Russian foreign language education

Multicultural literature portraying the bicultural or multicultural experience of ethnic minorities and other underrepresented communities is considered an ideal medium for the development of foreign language learners’ Intercultural Competence (IC). However, Russian foreign language (RFL) research so far has barely examined the pedagogical potential of literary texts by authors who write in Russian but do not identify as ethnically Russian. This article presents an initial attempt to fill this gap by arguing that Russophone literature is a particularly favourable didactic resource for the development of learners’ IC, and an effective way to promote a complex, dynamic, and non-essentialist view of Russian culture. It also advances a theory-grounded method for IC development by applying a general model of intercultural learning to the specific case of working with Russophone literature in an RFL classroom. Two literary texts by a contemporary Tatar Russophone author illustrate the proposed method to provide further guidance for both teachers and scholars interested in the pedagogical use of Russophone literature and multicultural literature in other languages.