Page 172 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 7
The multi-dimensional dialogical process resulted in several additions and changes to the Comprehensive Approach. In fact, almost all of the 20 underlying elements of the initial model underwent a minor or sometimes more major change. Whereas most of the changes resulted in a reduction of elements or simplification of the description of the element because of an ambiguous distinction or because elements were too verbose or terse, the most important changes were found when we added words or an entirely new element (section 3.3.1).
7.2.3 Research question 3: How do students perceive EFL literature lessons?
Chapters 4 and 5 of this thesis concentrate on how students perceive EFL literature lessons. In Chapter 4 we reported the results of a study in which we asked a total of 635 pre-university level students from 15 different secondary schools to answer the following question: What do you think are the benefits of EFL literature lessons? The Comprehensive Approach was used as a framework to analyse the 2361 answers we collected. In Chapter 5, we focused on the students’ motivation regarding EFL literature lessons, in which we operationalised external motivation as student level of engagement and internal motivation as how students view the importance of EFL lessons. The Likert-scale survey, which was based on the Engagement versus Disaffection survey (Skinner, Kindermann, & Furrer, 2009) and the Comprehensive Approach, was administered to 365 pre-university level students (year 5). The results of descriptive statistics, an exploratory factor analysis, and correlation analyses revealed four major findings.
First, based on the answers to the question how students view the importance of EFL literature lessons, we found a total of three factors, which we labelled Literature, Personal Development, and Language (Chapter 5). The original Text and Context approaches within the Comprehensive Approach seem to be considered as one according to students, which we labelled the ‘Language development and variety’ to be part of the Literature factor. In other words, based on teacher data we established that our understanding of a Comprehensive Approach to foreign language literature teaching and learning can be expressed in four approaches (Chapter 2). However, based on student data we found that there are not four but three approaches (i.e. factors) (Chapter 5). Although we acknowledge this contradiction and we revised the underlying elements based on student input, apart from Chapter 5, we decided to continue working with the original four approaches of the Comprehensive Approach based on the theoretical distinct difference between the Text and Context approaches (see sections 2.1.2).
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