EXPLORING THE REPRESENTATION OF PAKISTANI CULTURE IN INTERMEDIATE ENGLISH POETRY: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF SELECTED POEMS THROUGH CEFR

Abstract

This paper critically reviews the portrayal of the Pakistani culture in the English poems prescribed in the intermediate level (Grade XI) and assesses whether the portrayal is aligned to communicative, intercultural, and mediation competences that are related to the B1-B2 band of the CEFR. The qualitative content analysis was done on all 20 poems in the nationally prescribing Book 3 coded in three dimensions: (i) cultural representation (religion, nationalism, gender, labour, class, spirituality, resistance); (ii) communicative and interpretive demands aligned to CEFR expectations; and (iii) positioning of the learner in the poem (what kind of citizen, moral subject, or social actor does the given poem imagine her/him?). Results reveal that the syllabus creates two parallel cultural worlds of experience, institutional order, which lie in British / Euro-modern world and Pakistani/ South Asian, Muslim, and Sufi worlds of moral experience. Imported poems make students appear as ethical spectators of foreign culture, whereas domestically-produced ones make them appear as morally responsible members of the Pakistani community. The paper suggests that poetry within an intermediate English course is an identity-creating tool and that those mediation skills, as per CEFR, have been most effectively triggered when students describe their own world.