Page 178 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 7
integration is more practicable, providing teachers a clear focus in the lesson. How integration is interpreted could also depend on the learning objectives, the materials or activities, or on the role and position of the literature component within the EFL curriculum.
To summarise, the multiple focus that is required from teachers in a foreign language literature lesson taught in a comprehensive manner is demanding, and leaves us with two general questions. Firstly, how can the four approaches best be integrated? Secondly, how can the Language approach be included in a meaningful way? Both questions will be further addressed in sections 7.4 and 7.5.
7.3.2 The discrepancy between student perceptions and current teaching practice
Results from several studies in this thesis show that there are discrepancies between student and teacher perspectives regarding EFL literature teaching at three different levels. First, there is a major difference between what students believe is beneficial and important and what is currently happening in the EFL literature lessons. Whereas students indicated that the Language approach is especially beneficial and important, albeit in combination with other approaches, Dutch EFL teachers generally spend most of their lesson time on the Text approach and least of their lesson time on the Language approach. From a student perspective, the Text and Context approaches within the Comprehensive Approach can be considered as one, which we labelled the Literature factor. And from a student perspective, the element ‘Language development and variety’, which was originally considered to be part of the Language approach, bears a stronger relation to elements from the Literature factor, such ‘Literary terminology’. These substantial differences between students and teachers regarding their perceptions of EFL literature lessons raises three questions: Why do students perceive EFL literature lessons in a pragmatic, utilitarian language learning way? Why are literary texts mainly taught through a Text approach? Do we need to reconcile the previously described discrepancies?
That the majority of the students view EFL literature lessons through the lens of their language course could be ascribed to a reaction to current foreign language teaching in Dutch secondary education. Foreign language lessons in the Netherlands are primarily concerned with training students to become communicatively competent in a foreign language. This means that the current message students receive is that learning a foreign language primarily means mastering communicative language skills. Within this context, it is very likely
176