A Study on Cultural Authenticity of Folktale-based Chinese-American Picturebooks for Multicultural Education

Abstract

Multicultural picturebooks are commonly used to develop individuals’ perspectives toward other cultures, and as such, they bring a question about cultural authenticity and accuracy, for cultural unauthenticity and misrepresentations can lead young readers to form negative stereotypes and inaccurate ideas about other cultures. As Creany, et al. indicate, folktales are “repositories of cultural values” since they have been passed from generation to generation along the history, picturebooks based on folktales that deal with diverse cultures and values can play an important role in promoting multicultural education. However, there has not been a critical analysis of cultural authenticity in folktale-based picturebooks. Examining the corresponding original folktales in Chinese ancient literature, this article evaluates cultural authenticity of the most popular four folktale-based Chinese-American picturebooks. Apart from analysing and discussing the major problems observed in these picturebooks, this articles also provides some educational implications which can make a great contribution to multicultural education in EFL settings while relying on multicultural picturebooks as a language resource.