Page 13 - Getting of the fence

1.1 Introduction 1
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) 1 has a prominent position in Dutch secondary education and became compulsory for every student in 2013. Although the majority of the EFL curriculum concerns foreign language skills, such as reading and writing, literature also plays an important part. It is, however, noteworthy that ever since the EFL curriculum was formalised in 1863, continuing discussions about the position, relevance, and focus of the literature component have taken place. These discussions have resulted in several theses (such as de Melker, 1970 and Wilhelm, 2005 for EFL) and overview studies, including Geschiedenis van het talenonderwijs in Nederland: Onderwijs in de moderne talen van 1500 tot heden 2 (Hulshof, Kwakernaak, & Wilhelm, 2015) and the series of papers published by Kwakernaak in 1997 and 2016. Discussions about the position, relevance, and focus of the foreign language literature curriculum have also been taking place at an international level. Studies and reviews by for example, Sage (1987), Lazar (1993), Paran (2008), and Paesani (2011) come to the same conclusion as the studies that describe the Dutch context, namely: the position of literature in the foreign language curriculum appears to be a principium tertii exclusi - law of the excluded middle - shifting between either a focus on the literary text or a focus on foreign language development. In this thesis, we explore the relevance and focus of EFL literature teaching in Dutch secondary education by empirically researching the current situation from different perspectives.
In this Introduction, foreign language literature teaching is first discussed within the Dutch context and then positioned within the international field. Leading from this discussion we provide the objective for this thesis and the research questions. We then introduce an overview of the main theories we used in the empirical chapters (Chapters 2 - 6) and we finish with an overview of the content and the organisation of this thesis. Because the majority of the sources used in Chapter 1 are written in Dutch, we decided to only provide the English translation of direct quotations.
1 Although we focus on EFL (English as a foreign language) in this thesis, several studies and overviews sometimes describe a particular language and sometimes refer to foreign language teaching in general. In order to be as specific as possible without affecting the readability, we will use EFL when it concerns English and foreign language teaching when it concerns foreign languages in general.
2 In English: History of language teaching in the Netherlands: Education in modern languages from 1500 to the present.
General introduction
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