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                                Students’ perspective on the benefits of literature lessons
 do not feel this gap is bridgeable (Hattie & Yates, 2014). If teachers in a school like school J, for example, (0% Text approach) offered literature lessons primarily through a Text approach, destructive frictions (Vermunt & Verloop, 1999) could occur because students do not see the relevance of this type of EFL literature lessons (Hattie & Yates, 2014).
One word of caution regarding the interpretation of our study is that although
we made considerable efforts to understand the students’ point of view, we still
were limited to our own ways of interpreting their words due to the format of
the students’ responses. Because we asked the students a single open question,
students were first of all constrained by their ability to articulate their ideas on
the spot. Furthermore, our unit of analysis was fully dependent on whether or not
students decided to elaborate their responses in detail. Due to this dependence 4 on student willingness to participate, our data may not fully reflect the extent of
the students’ views about the benefits of EFL literature education. Another issue
that should be raised here is the fact that we researched students’ perspective with
regard to EFL literature education. There is a possibility that students could have a
different view of literature in other foreign languages. Therefore, we would suggest
future research being conducted into this in the teaching of other foreign languages
taught in secondary education. Future research could also investigate whether
students have the same view of literature in English (a compulsory subject) and
the other foreign language they are taking (as an elective).
Taken as a whole, our methodology did generate a substantial amount of rich data, and the results of this study provide important information about what learners think of EFL literary education, information that can be used by teachers and curriculum designers when working on designing or enriching the literature component. Also, understanding how students perceive specific areas of the curriculum can provide teachers with invaluable information that could be useful to fit course content to specific student needs (Akyel & Yalçin, 1990; Cook-Sather, 2002; Pflaum & Bishop, 2004).
4.6 Conclusion
The main purpose of this study was to investigate EFL literature teaching through the perspectives of a large group of secondary school students. The findings show that although there are considerable differences between the perspectives of
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