Page 176 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 7
One aspect that needs careful consideration when discussing the usefulness of the Comprehensive Approach through the lens of Practicality Theory is the Language approach. One important result of our study is that the historically uneasy relationship between language acquisition and literature (sections 1.2 and 1.3) became tangible, not only in terms of how teachers interpreted this approach and experienced implementing this approach as difficult and time-consuming, but also in terms of analysis. The Language approach will be discussed in more detail in the following section.
7.3 Discussion
7.3.1 The Comprehensive Approach and the role of the Language approach
The Comprehensive Approach enabled us to paint a picture of how literature is currently approached in EFL lessons in Dutch secondary education and how students perceive and value these lessons. It also offered a group of eight teachers a common language, which enabled them to analyse their own curriculum and enrich it where necessary and possible. Although based on an extensive literature review and several activities with teacher educators, secondary school teachers, and students, designing such a framework is never objective. It contains a vision, a direction in which we believe foreign language literature education should move, i.e. as an integrated part of the foreign language curriculum. This assumed desirable position of literature within the foreign language curriculum however, does provide some issues.
Moving away from the principium tertii exclusi, i.e. leaving the shifting tradition between a focus either on foreign language development or on the literary text behind us, turned out to be relevant but also challenging. As we discussed and concluded in all empirical chapters, the Language approach appears to be an issue both practically as well as methodologically. Teachers indicated that implementing the Language approach in their lessons was tricky and time-consuming. One possible explanation could be the historical position of literature within the language curriculum (Kwakernaak 2016a; Kwakernaak, 2016b). Literature lessons in the Netherlands are generally separated from the rest of the curriculum, resulting often in a separate module and separate tests or exams. This is also visible in the three core curriculum standards (Meijer & Fasoglio, 2007) for the literature component, which do not include elements of the
174