The way to intercultural learning is through the stomach – Genre-based writing in the EFL classroom

This article reports on and analyzes the products of a series of English as a Foreign Language lessons revolving around the topic of food, which resulted in German students mediating typical recipes from their native languages and home cultures into English. To enable learners linguistically to transfer their findings into English a genre-based approach (cf. Henry & Roseberry 1996, 1998, 2001a & b) was taken. The resulting texts, “cultural translations” in the sense of Norton (2008), are analyzed in terms of their content, structure, and lexis in order to determine their authenticity with respect to the linguistic features characteristic of the genre, as well as with respect to their potential to provide insight into the students’ home cultures.