Page 160 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 6
Finally, it should also be noted that the coded time spent on the Language approach does not represent the actual time spent on this approach. Leaving out the Language approach element ‘Language skills’ in our coding and analyses was a very unfortunate decision we had to make. Historical changes in the position of the literature curriculum (Chapter 1), the importance students ascribe to this particular element (see Chapters 4 and 5), and the interpretation of the Language approach by teachers (Chapter 6), make the Language approach of key importance as well as a key issue. In the next section, we will discuss this limitation as well as future implications of this decision in more detail.
6.6 Conclusions, limitations, and future research
Evaluating theoretical teaching models such as the Comprehensive Approach through empirical validation is essential in PCK research, which focuses on building a bridge between theory and the daily teaching practice. Through an instrumental multisite multiple case study, which involved an intervention, eight teachers, and 276 video-recorded EFL literature lessons over the course of two years, we were able to evaluate how teachers experienced the relevance and usefulness of the Comprehensive Approach in their existing EFL literature curriculum. Based on these results, several conclusions can be drawn and several limitations should be highlighted.
Not only do historical changes regarding the position of EFL literature show the uneasy relationship between content and language (see section 1.2), the results of this final empirical study show that this uneasy relationship is also tangible in the EFL lessons. Leaving out Language approach element ‘Language skills’ was an unfortunate decision we had to make, as this element was deemed beneficial and important by students (Chapters 4 and 5) and was consciously implemented by several teachers in year 2 (section 6.4.2). The fact that the Language approach, and especially the above-mentioned underlying element, appeared an issue is, in a way, representative of the complexity of integrating content (i.e. literature) and language development in the EFL curriculum. This is evidenced by teaching approaches such as Content Based Language Teaching (Snow & Brinton, 1988), Task Based Language Teaching (Norris, 2009) and Content and Language Integrated Learning (Coyle, 2007) where content is generally the means through which foreign language development can take place (de Graaff, 2018). Moreover,
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