Page 26 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 1
The following five research questions are guiding this thesis:
1. What does a foreign language literature teaching model look like that includes various aspects of the learner, the context, and the literary text?
2. What can the contribution of students to the collaborative and co- constructive process of validating such a foreign language literature teaching model be?
3. How do students perceive EFL literature lessons?
4. How is EFL literature currently approached in Dutch secondary
education?
5. How do teachers experience the relevance and usefulness of a foreign
language literature teaching model that includes various aspects of the learner, the context, and the literary text, when applied in a naturalistic setting?
1.7 Methodological approach
This thesis contains two educational design studies, which emphasise the involvement of teachers and students in a natural teaching context (McKenney & Reeves, 2019). The first is described in Chapters 2 and 3 and follows the original process of consecutive prototypes through cycles of analysis, design, development, and evaluation. The second is described in Chapter 6 and follows an adaptation of the process whereby multiple prototypes (cases) were developed simultaneously by several teachers. Both studies were theoretically oriented, iterative, highly collaborative, interventionist, and responsively grounded (McKenney & Reeves, 2019).
Considering the three-fold objective and research questions of this thesis, a mixed method approach was applied, including surveys, interviews, and video- recorded lesson observations. In the editorial of the first volume of the Journal of Mixed Methods Research, Tashakkori and Cresswell (2007) define mixed method research as research “in which the investigator collects and analyses data, integrates the findings, and draws inferences using both qualitative and quantitative approaches or methods in a single study or a program of inquiry” (p. 4). The fundamental principle of mixed methods research is the integration of both quantitative and qualitative methods, thereby building on their complementary
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