Analysing multilingual adults’ reactions to a literary text of Middle Eastern origin

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on conducting a small-scale research on multilingual adults (18+) and their reactions to stories of Middle Eastern origin. It involves 10 participants, (50% males, 50% females) who form part of the Arab community. Their parents are of mixed cultures, resulting in the participants being half Maltese and half Arab. They also follow the Muslim faith, as do most of the Arabic speaking communities. The languages used for the stories are Standard Arabic and English. The purpose of this research is to identify similarities and differences in readers’ reactions to the literary texts both when engaging on a cultural and a linguistic level. It will also investigate the relationship between the choice of language when they read and talk about the literary texts.