Page 80 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 3
based on their suggestions, thereby ensuring a clearer formulation. Through these additions and changes, the students helped us shape and define our model by showing us how they view EFL literature education within the boundaries of the initial model. In other words, through learner-oriented discourses (Charteris & Smardon, 2018) the students’ contributions did indeed have a constructive and unique impact on the development of our model. Importantly, our final model is a model, which we could not have reached on our own – one of the points Lodge (2005) makes in her definition of dialogue, referred to in our opening sections.
Despite our carefully constructed dialogical research process with the collective student, this process did not directly involve the Learner as initiators perspective. Although including this perspective was not considered relevant because we were interested in further developing and validating a literature teaching model that was the result of previous research, what we could have done in retrospect to improve this project, was include this perspective of student voice when designing the actual research process and research activities. The students could have opened up uncharted territories (Pinter, 2014) by designing refreshing research activities from their own unique points of view. Or as one of the participants in an IATEFL webinar on researching with children (Pinter, Kuchah, & Smith, 2013) wondered: “If we put students in the centre of learning, why should we not put them in the centre of research projects as well?” (p. 486).
3.5 Conclusion
In this chapter, we have explored the different perspectives in which secondary school students can be constructively involved in research projects, thereby adding to the body of empirical research in secondary foreign language-literature teaching as well as research into learner oriented discourses. Including the student’s voice in refining the underlying elements of the Comprehensive Approach can be beneficial for foreign language teachers who wish to align the way the instructional environment is perceived by their students and themselves because alignment can only be achieved when students and teachers have a very clear and unambiguous understanding of the underlying elements.
In this chapter, we have argued that the prevailing understanding that including student voice through the Learners as data source perspective is considered a model of non-participation (Hart, 1992) should be rejected. Instead,
78