Page 20 - Getting of the fence
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                                Chapter 1
 1.3 International context
Reviews by, for example, Carter (2007), Hall (2015), Kramsch and Kramsch (2000), Paesani (2011), Paran (2006), and Paran (2008) all discuss the converging and diverging movements between literature and language throughout the decades. To summarise, in the early part of the 20th century literature was the primary object of study, holding a “place of prestige in the academic community and served as a source of moral and ideational inspiration and content” (Paesani, 2011, p. 161). Between 1940 and 1960, this academic prestige was regarded as an elitist pursuit, superfluous to everyday communication. The period between the 1970s and 1990s, with the growth of communicative language teaching, however, reconsidered the role of literature. In the United States this period was labelled the ‘proficiency movement’, perceiving literature as “an opportunity to develop vocabulary acquisition, the development of reading strategies, and the training of critical thinking, that is, reasoning skills” (Kramsch & Kramsch, 2000, p. 567). The most recent development in this field of research includes literature in the language curriculum as a way to address intercultural awareness and intercultural competence (Kramsch & Kramsch, 2000; Paesani, 2011). Or, as Paran (2008) summarizes: “more holistic perspectives which take different aspects of the learner and the context of learning into account, looking at the whole person and the whole culture, in which literature is part of developing the whole person, and in which affective development and affective factors are taken into account” (Paran, 2008, p. 469). Paesani (2011) labelled the search for a balance between a language learning focus and a literary focus “language-literature instruction” and defined it as “the deliberate integration of language development and literary study at all levels of the curriculum” (p. 162).
Indeed, the questions that have been addressed for over 150 years in the Dutch context were also at the heart of the discussion internationally, evidenced for example by the two overarching concerns of Literature and Language Teaching (Brumfit & Carter, 1986): “What is literature, and what therefore should be selected as a basis for teaching literature, and why? How should it be taught, and what is its overall place, internationally, in language education?” (Carter, 2007, p. 4). Carter (2007) quite right concludes that the question that had been raised 20 years previous in the papers in Brumfit and Carter (1986) were still being asked, in many cases with greater sharpness and relevance for the design of curricula” (Carter, 2007, p. 7). Moreover, although the “resurgence in the use of literature
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