Page 52 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 2
The correlation analyses and t-tests provided us with more details regarding the relation of various teacher demographics and curricular factors on the reported occurrence of the four approaches. The data informed us that the way foreign language literature is approached in the lessons is not significantly related to the gender, years of teaching experience, or education of the teachers. This could be explained by a phenomenon we describe as curricular heritage: teachers start working at a new school and ‘inherit’ the existing curriculum. Due to factors such as tradition, showing respect towards colleagues, lack of financial means, or lack of experience, new teachers adopt the existing curriculum and teach accordingly. Another explanation could be the way literature curricula are designed; in case of joint effort this could lead to consensus in curricular decisions.
Albeit not very strong, we did find that the age of the teacher is slightly related to the time spent on the Context approach. A reason for this could be their personal experience as secondary school or higher education/ university students; the focus of foreign language literature curricula used to be rather Context approach heavy (de Melker, 1970; Wilhelm, 2005).
The Context approach also stood out when we examined the following curricular factors: the difference in average occurrence of the four approaches between years 4, 5, and 6; the number of literature lessons taught per year; and the percentage of the literature component for the final English mark. The Context approach was the only approach that significantly related to each of these curricular factors and it was the only approach that significantly related to the difference between the three years. An increasing amount of lesson time is spent on this approach when students move from one year to the next, which could be linked to the third Core Curriculum Standard which requires students to have an overview of literary history and asks students to place studied works in a historic perspective. The increasing experience students have with foreign language literature and their increasing language levels could be relevant in explaining this significant relation. On the other hand, the fact that most of the approaches did not correlate significantly with the difference between the three years is not surprising, since the three standards are not associated with any particular year.
The Reader approach did not significantly relate with any of the three curricular factors. One possible reason for this could be the way literature is tested; questions related to personal opinion and development might be harder to grade than questions related to the Text or Context approach. This assumption is underlined when looking at the results of the percentage of the literature component for the
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