Page 18 - Getting of the fence
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                                Chapter 1
 Despite all these changes in the EFL curriculum, the traditional link between literary knowledge and language proficiency remained, although it changed its focus to practicing reading skills with literary texts. Literary knowledge was also still primarily tested in an oral exam, even though the literature lessons were increasingly taught in Dutch (Kwakernaak, 1997b).
1.2.3 1998 – 2019 (Period 3)
In line with the developments up until 1997, the new exam programme that was introduced in 1998 (in Dutch: Wet op het Voortgezet Onderwijs) introduced even more specific curriculum standards for the literature curriculum as well as a further reduction in lesson time, based on the so-called ‘study load hours’ (in Dutch: Studiebelastingsuren) (Hulshof, Kwakernaak, & Wilhelm, 2015). The new prescriptive requirements included that the number of literary works students had to study was reduced to a minimum of three (Kwakernaak, 2014), there were requirements for the division of the percentages between the different proficiency components and literature, and several learning objectives were introduced, covering the following three subdomains: literary development, literary terminology, and literary history.
Taking together the reduction in time, the more diverse goals, the unclear content, and the separation from language proficiency, literature within foreign language education was no longer taken for granted (Kwakernaak, 2016b). The break between language and literature was further emphasised by the option to exclude all literature teaching from the foreign language curriculum and merge the literature component with the then new subject ‘Culture and Art’ (in Dutch: Culturele en Kunstzinnige Vorming, in short, CKV), so-called ‘Integrated Literature Education’ (in Dutch: Geïntegreerd Literatuur Onderwijs) (Kwakernaak, 2017). However, many foreign language teachers did not experience this as an opportunity for joint improvement of literature teaching, but as an attack on their own subject (Kwakernaak, 2017).
The Improved Educational Reforms of 2007, which saw several changes in the requirements for literature teaching, are still in use today: how the percentages for the different components in the curriculum are divided is up to the teachers themselves, the required minimum of literary works remained three literary works, and the number of learning objectives was reduced to the following three for pre-university level students:
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