Page 19 - Getting of the fence

(1) the student can recognize and distinguish literary text types and can use 1 literary terms when interpreting literary texts;
(2) the student can give an overview of the main events of literary history and can place the studied works in this historic perspective; and
(3) the student can report about their reading experiences of at least three literary works with clear arguments (Meijer & Fasoglio, 2007).
These three subdomains, i.e. literary development, literary terminology, and literary history which were introduced in 1998, remained.
The most recent national development is Curriculum.nu (which started in 2018) where development teams of teachers and school leaders, under the supervision of Stichting Leerplan Ontwikkeling, have formulated nine learning areas including what primary and secondary school students should be able to know and do within each learning area. The primary objective of Curriculum.nu is to design a proposal for revising the current core curriculum standards (in Dutch: kerndoelen en eindtermen). One of the nine learning areas is English/Modern Foreign Languages and one of the innovative proposals is a more holistic approach to foreign language learning where language learning is more than training language skills. The position of literature within this more holistic approach is seen as integrated within learning how to communicate in a foreign language. This proposal, however, does not coincide with reality: the decision to make EFL, together with Dutch and Mathematics, a core subject in 2013 has resulted in excessive exam training in the reading of expository texts and a dwindling position of the literature component. This development is in line with the curricular changes in the language curriculum towards a utilitarian proficiency-centred programme ever since 1968.
To summarise, after decades of discussions, disagreements, and policy changes, the position, relevance, and focus of literature within the EFL curriculum remains the centre of attention for researchers and policy makers. It could even be argued that, similar to the Dutch literature curriculum, the foreign language literature curriculum can be defined as ill-structured. Witte (2008) used the term ‘ill-structured domain’, introduced by Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, and Coulson (1991), in order to characterise the curriculum for Dutch literature. Witte (2008) argued that the literature domain in secondary education is ill-structured because of a lack of theory, a multitude of visions, and an inadequate connection between education and the learning needs of students (see also van der Knaap, 2014 regarding literature teaching in German as a foreign language).
General introduction
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