Page 159 - Getting of the fence

The relevance and usefulness of the Comprehensive Approach
lessons, inspiring her to add more variation in approaches (accommodation). She did however indicate that she had needed year 2 to come to terms with this new structure adding that she felt the lessons in year 2 were not any different compared to the lessons she taught in year 1. Interestingly, through the process of accommodation, Liz did in fact approach the literary texts in a more comprehensive manner in year 2. Where in year 1 her average deviation from the assumed even distribution was 35%, this deviation was reduced to 21% in year 2. To summarise, because teachers experienced the relevance and usefulness of the Comprehensive Approach differently, variation in the operationalization appears to be inevitable.
A final point of discussion regarding the relevance and usefulness of the Comprehensive Approach concerns the Language approach. On the one hand,
considered through the lens of Practicality Theory (Doyle & Ponder, 1977; Janssen,
Westbroek, & Doyle, 2015), teachers indicated that implementing the Language
approach was time-consuming, the Language approach was “tricky to implement,”
(Caitlin) and hardly a part of their literature curriculum. Teachers also mentioned
the high cost in terms of time to enrich their existing curriculum with this
approach. However, they also said that they were more focused on using the target
language and integrating practising language skills, such as writing or listening,
in their literature curriculum in year 2. The reason for this dichotomy could be 6 how teachers made sense of the Language approach. Apparently, teachers were
not consciously aware that a writing or listening assignment based on literature constitutes a Language approach. Additionally, they did not regard the use of the target language during EFL literature lessons a Language approach. Furthermore, despite several attempts, we came to the conclusion that we were not able to code the Language approach element, ‘Language skills.’ Our video data did, for example, not reveal whether students were writing in English or speaking in English when working in pairs or small groups. Another reason could be the position of the literature curriculum in foreign language teaching in Dutch secondary education (section 1.2). In the 1990s exam regulations prescribed the use of L1 in EFL literature exams and a separation of testing EFL literature and language skills (Kwakernaak, 2016). These regulations had a wash back effect on EFL literature lessons, which were – and still are – increasingly taught in L1 (Hulshof et al., 2015). Therefore, the fact that the literature component in the EFL curriculum is often regarded as detached from students’ English language development, could be connected to how teachers make sense of the Language approach in connection to EFL literature teaching.
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