Page 188 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 7
we suggested approaching literary texts through a combination of approaches. Depending on the learning needs of students, teachers need to, for example, decide which approach is emphasised or with which approach a lesson starts. This, in turn, requires teachers to be aware of the learning needs of their students as well as to be knowledgeable about how they approach literature in their EFL lessons. According to Carter (2015) there are two types of teachers: “those principally concerned with relevance and utility (mainly language teachers) and those principally concerned with literature, culture, and significance (mainly literature teachers)” (p. 316). The Comprehensive Approach can not only help teachers in distinguishing what type of teacher they are, it can also help foreign language teachers in analysing their literature curriculum and so prevent any blind spots (Vermunt & Verloop, 1991).
7.6 To conclude
A central aim of educational research - according to Verloop (1991) quoted on the first page of the research programme of the teacher education institute of the University of Groningen (van Veen, 2015) - is to provide teachers with empirically and theoretically based insights and coherent frames of references to better understand and improve their teaching and the learning of their students. For the eight teachers in our study, one of the main results of enriching their existing EFL literature curricula with the Comprehensive Approach was that it allowed them to rethink the why, how, and what of their EFL literature teaching practice. As such, we can conclude that the results of this thesis have reached this central aim. Moreover, the results of the five empirical studies in this thesis can be used in current national and international discussions regarding the integration of language development and content in the foreign language curriculum.
In referring to the title of this thesis, it is time to get off the fence and decide that the principium tertii exclusi is outdated. It is time to stop justifying the role, position, and relevance of literature in foreign language education. It is, however, time to create a well-structured foreign language literature research agenda and to start helping teachers in the why, how, and what of a content rich foreign language curriculum.
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