Page 85 - Getting of the fence

Students’ perspective on the benefits of literature lessons
4.1 Introduction
Teachers, teacher educators, and researchers often discuss what happens in
classrooms around the world without inviting students to take part in these
discussions. Especially in situations where part of the curriculum is in transition,
such as foreign language literature teaching, it is all the more valuable to include
the voice of those who experience the curriculum first hand. It was precisely such
a voice, a secondary school student’s deceptively simple question, ‘What’s the
point of reading this novel in English?’ addressed to the researcher, which was
the starting point for this study. This question led us to investigate the benefits of
literature in English as a foreign language (EFL) through the perspectives of Dutch
secondary school students, for whom this component is a compulsory part of their 4 English language course.
We start with a short survey of the re-emergence of literature as a valuable component in foreign language teaching, with a focus on integrated language and literature programmes. This is followed by a discussion of the importance of studying student perspectives and how this has been researched within the field of foreign language education so far. We then present the findings from a study in which we analysed the responses to a single open question regarding the benefits of foreign language literature education. We end with a discussion of the implications of our findings in a theoretical as well as practical light.
4.2 Background
4.2.1 Integrated Language and Literature Curricula
The idea that literature can be considered an integrated component in the foreign language curriculum has been around for several decades. Herr (1982), for example, spoke about literature as “an integral and revitalized part of foreign language education at every level” (p. 205). The position of literature teaching in foreign language education later moved from being a ‘welcome guest’ to an ‘unwelcome ghost’ (Pulverness, 2014), and finally back to being regarded as a valuable component of the foreign language curriculum (Paran, 2008). The notion of an integrated language and literature curriculum was further emphasized by the Modern Language Association (MLA) in the US, which in 2007 proposed a reform replacing the language-literature divide with an integrated foreign
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