Page 35 - Getting of the fence

Table 2.1 Organisation of foreign language curricula in Dutch secondary education
National Exams: year 6 (50% of final mark) School Exams: years 4, 5, and 6 (50% of final mark)
Reading skills (expository texts) Reading skills Writing skills
Listening skills
Speaking skills 2 Literature
When foreign languages became a compulsory component in Dutch secondary education after 1863, canonical works were read out loud and translated sentence by sentence and students had to be knowledgeable about one or two literary periods (Wilhelm, 2005). Between 1968 and 1998 the Dutch secondary school system was determined by the Law regarding Secondary Education. Even though now more emphasis was placed on practical knowledge and usage of the foreign language, literature remained part of the curriculum (Mulder, 1997). Students were required to create an individual reading list of twelve literary works, which had to be studied at home without any help or input from foreign language teachers. Despite this requirement, many schools stuck with the pre- 1968 tradition and often about a third of the lesson time was spent on studying literature (Mulder, 1997). The Educational Reforms of 1998 saw the introduction of several prescriptive requirements for foreign language literature: 13 learning objectives were introduced covering three subdomains (literary development, literary terminology, and literary history); directions about the number of works students had to read were reduced to a minimum of three (Mulder, 1997); and foreign language teachers received directions about the percentage of the different components for the final English mark (e.g. listening skills had factor 3 and literature factor 1).
Nine years after the introduction of the Educational Reforms of 1998 the government introduced a revised version, ‘the Improved Educational Reforms’ of 2007, which is still in use today. Since 2007, foreign language teachers are free to decide on the percentage of all components in the School Exams, the required minimum is still three literary works, and the number of learning objectives has been reduced from thirteen to the following three (Meijer & Fasoglio, 2007):
1. The student can recognize and distinguish literary text types and can use literary terms when interpreting literary texts.
2. The student can give an overview of the main events of literary history and can place the studied works in this historic perspective.
Exploring EFL literature approaches
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