Page 91 - Getting of the fence

Step Question
1 Is the answer positively or negatively worded?
2 Does the answer fit into one of the 15 elements?
3 Does the answer fit into one of the approaches?
4 Is the answer related to English or English
literature?
Example student answer
‘No complete lessons about strange facts regarding the author because nobody is interested and you will forget these in no time’
‘Getting ideas for reading new books’ ‘Knowledge of the English language’
‘You can join a conversation about English books and appear very intelligent’
Code Negative
Approach: Reader approach Element: Literary taste
Language approach Yes
Students’ perspective on the benefits of literature lessons
4.3.2 Procedure
Because we wanted to unearth genuine views, allow spontaneity, and avoid bias in
response categories that might result from suggesting desirable answers, we asked
the students the following single open question: What do you think are the benefits
of EFL literature lessons? We chose this method in preference to interviewing
because we wanted to collect answers from a large group of students from many
different schools to gain a broad view of students’ perceptions on this topic. The
single open question survey was handed out by EFL teachers during regular lesson
time and all students were instructed to answer the question in bullet-points. The
students were given approximately 10 minutes to do this. The question was posed
in Dutch and, apart from a few exceptions, all students answered in Dutch (all
quotations in this study are our translations). 4
4.3.3 Analyses
Table 4.2 shows several examples of the data we collected, including the coding procedure (the questions we asked in the analysis and the code we assigned to the examples).
Table 4.2 Coding procedure including example student answers
In order to analyse the data we used the Comprehensive Approach to foreign language literature teaching and learning. The data were coded by an independent rater who was first trained in the four approaches and underlying 15 elements of the Comprehensive Approach (see Figure 4.1) and in identifying these approaches and elements in the data. At the start of the training the independent rater was informed about the background of the instrument and the purpose of its use. To ensure that we could code every single student answer (a total of 2361 answers) we used the coding procedure outlined in Table 4.2. We first decided whether the
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