Page 36 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 2
3. The student can report about their reading experiences of at least three literary works with clear arguments.
These three standards are the only guidelines foreign language teachers have with regard to the literature component. There are, for example, no requirements with regard to the level of some of the standards and neither is there a specification of what can be understood by ‘reading experience’ or ‘literary works’. Even though the three standards offer teachers a great deal of freedom when designing the literature component, they present two issues. First of all, due to their general and non-prescriptive nature they do not provide any form of theoretically informed guidance for foreign language teachers. Secondly, the standards do not provide clear learning objectives which are based on benefits literature can offer language students.
English, together with Dutch and Mathematics, became a core subject in 2013, which has resulted in excessive National Exam training with expository texts and a dwindling position of literature. This development is in line with the curricular changes in Dutch secondary education since 1968 and underlines the idea of foreign language education as economically beneficial (Paran, 2008; Shanahan, 1997) where the literature component is not of primary concern.
2.1.2 Foreign language literature as content
The suggested reform made by the MLA in 2007 to move towards an integrated language and literature curriculum presents the option for foreign language teachers to use literature as the actual content of language classes. In this light we can view Paran’s (2008) quadrant (see Figure 2.1) of the intersection of literature and language teaching, as a conceptualization of these integrated constructs.
Paran’s quadrant can be regarded as a visualisation of Maley’s (1989) distinction between two primary purposes for foreign language literature teaching; the study of literature and the use of literature as a resource. The more academic study of literature can be understood as a literary critical approach (quadrant 3) or as a stylistic approach (quadrant 1). In the use of literature as a resource the main focus is the interaction a student has with the text and other students (quadrant 2).
Various researchers and practitioners have defined approaches to the inclusion of literature in foreign language curricula (see Table 2.2).
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