Reading beyond Cultural Barriers: A Study on American Adolescents` Responses to the Korean Picture Book, Doggy Poo = Reading beyond Cultural Barriers: A Study on American Adolescents` Responses to the Korean Picture Book, Doggy Poo

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This qualitative research is to explore how American adolescents perceive, interpret and understand Doggy Poo, which is a translated Korean picture book. This research started with three questions to be resolved. 1) How American adolescent readers appreciate Doggy Poo? 2) How do cultural backgrounds affect American adolescents’ responses on Doggy Poo? 3) How do American adolescents transform their prior thoughts in order to accommodate new thoughts and knowledge that Doggy Poo implies? These questions will be dealt with through out the research. Results found follow as below. All of the participants had agreed that the Doggy Poo have great messages and lessons. However, they contended that there are some aspects of something strange or weird to American adolescents. We found that the strangeness or weirdness felt by the participants was largely due to the main character who is a literally dog’s poop. Especially, some of participants who have Indian cultural backgrounds were bothered by use of doggy poo as main character and Christian orientation based on their cultural value-laden interpretation. That kind of cultural backgrounds seemed to affect their appreciation of Doggy Poo. Throughout the research, participants found themselves transformed by being touched by great messages of the story and their perspectives changed. They experienced ‘reading beyond cultural barriers.’ Before starting this research, there was an assumption that cultural differences between Korean and American may prevent American readers from understanding the themes and messages of the book that the author intended to portray and Korean readers receive when reading the book. Contrary to the assumption, most participants understood the theme and message of the book and appreciated its greatness as a children’s book. Some students have felt some disturbances or cultural shock due to cultural differences. In spite of that, they could read great messages that Doggy Poo provides beyond cultural barriers. This study asks us look into our assumptions about text, culture, readers, and reading. We could see the transforming powers that the Kwon Jung-Saeng’s honorable story, Doggy Poo has. One of the most important things for translated Korean books is themes and messages based on the condition that translation is well done. There is little barrier of cultural backgrounds that prevent the foreign readers from understanding if the translated Korean books have powerful messages and themes. This research suggests that educators or researchers should take into account cultural diversities of readers in other countries as well because there are many subcultural groups different from mainstreams even though they are regarded as a same group in terms of nationality. To get better readers to read translated Korean books and understand well, educators and researchers should consider cultural/social/personal backgrounds of readers as “linguistic experiential reservoirs” (Rosenblatt, 1985;2004) and try to provide more dialogical and collaborative contexts for the reading events.