Page 121 - Getting of the fence

Student motivation in the EFL literature lesson
answers in detail. However, when presented with all 15 underlying elements of the Comprehensive Approach to Foreign Language literature teaching and learning in our current study, students rated these fairly high. This difference in results as an artefact of methodological choices is also valuable to the empirical body of research into the area of foreign language literature education because it shows that methodological choices have a demonstrative impact on the outcome of research.
The results also show that students scored each of the three factors between a 1
and a 4, which means that students vary greatly in what they find important. Applying
these results to teaching practice, when a class is asked whether and why they want to
do a certain activity (Wigfield & Cambria, 2010) a variety of answers is to be expected
based on the students’ subjective values. In order to establish desirable situations of
congruence as well as constructive frictions (Vermunt & Verloop, 1999), teachers
could benefit from language-literature instruction where the balance between the
Literature, Language, and Personal Development factors plays out differently in
different lessons. These results could also be of interest to policy makers working on 5 guidelines for a more integrated language-literature curriculum.
Our study shows, unsurprisingly, that students who value the Literature factor highly generally show a high level of engagement and a low level of disaffection in EFL literature classrooms. On the other hand, whether students value the Language factor highly does not seem to have an impact on their levels of engagement or disaffection. Due to the huge differences in literature curricula and the large number of classes that participated in our study, the data we collected does not provide any insights into what is actually happening in literature classrooms, such as types of activities, how literary texts are approached, or which literary texts are used. Nevertheless, an assumption can be made that, based on the three Core Curriculum Standards, there is a strong focus on the Literature factor, resembling Paran’s (2008) third quadrant, where “literature is only discussed as literature and no overt focus is paid to language development” (p. 467). For students who value the Literature factor highly, this would create a congruent instructional environment. However, it could be the case that students who value the language factor highly still find sufficient attention to language in these lessons (for example, through language practice), which could explain why there is no relation between valuing the Language factor highly and students’ levels of engagement.
The lack of a significant relationship between the Language and Literature factors could suggest that Carter’s (2015) observation of a dichotomy between teachers, where language teachers are mainly concerned with “relevance and utility” and where
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