Page 16 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 1
objected to linking literary knowledge to the oral exam. If a disconnection is not possible, he disputed that “we will have to reconcile that we are actually teaching skills with a work of art as a direct object” (de Melker, 1970, p. 32). In other words, Verhoeff argued that combining the oral exam and literary knowledge was in fact disregarding the literary works.
1.2.2 1968 – 1997 (Period 2)
After the introduction of the Mammoetwet 3 in 1968, the position of EFL literature education changed. Teachers now had complete freedom regarding the content and form of the exam. The only prescription included that “the literature read by the candidate ... must include a number of works from the last half century and a number from the time before that”. (Kwakernaak, 1997a, p. 112). Unsurprisingly, this situation led to “non-commitment, lack of clarity, and confusion about goals, scope, and content” (Kwakernaak, 1997b, p. 136). Nevertheless, the examining of literary knowledge remained connected to the oral exam. Interestingly, when Thijssen (1985) asked teachers of German why literature should be a part of their subject, only an average of 8% of the teachers ticked the “it is important for language development” box (p. 108).
After years of discussion and critique, 1992 saw a clear break between language proficiency and literature teaching. The designated committee of 1992 declared that in the process of selecting and formulating the literature objectives, it was decided that the aspect of language acquisition through literary education was intentionally left out. This resulted in the following guidelines for the literature exam: “Mixing of literary skills and productive skills must be prevented. When testing knowledge of and insight into literature and reporting on learning and reading experiences, the candidate can determine the language in which the testing takes place. Integrated testing of literature and another language proficiency is excluded in the examination programme” (Kwakernaak, 1997b, p. 138). At the end of this period, there was even an attempt to separate literature and language completely by granting students two separate marks.
Despite its more anchored position in the curriculum, literature teaching was now also in competition with language proficiency. Especially with the rise of communicative language teaching since the second half of the 1980s, foreign
3 The main idea behind the ‘Mammoetwet’ (officially the Secondary Education Act) was that every student should follow both general and vocational education. Because this Act brought forth a plethora of changes, it was labelled the ‘Mammoetwet’.
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