Students’ perspective on the benefits of EFL literature education

Abstract

Understanding students' perspectives on the foreign language (FL) curriculum could be considered as a vital step in curriculum design and lesson planning. This study drew on data provided by a single open question survey to investigate the perspective of Dutch secondary school students (N = 635) from 15 different schools with regard to the benefits of literature education in English as a foreign language (EFL). This study also sought to find out whether there are any differences in these perspectives between the different schools. The Comprehensive Approach to Foreign Language Literature Learning was used to analyse the students' answers. Results show that the majority of the students consider literature in a FL primarily as language education. Furthermore, a comparison between the 15 schools indicated that there were differences in the way students from different schools perceive the benefits of the EFL literature curriculum. The article concludes with a discussion of pedagogical issues and suggestions for ways in which the student perspective can be studied on a small scale.

Connecting students and researchers: the secondary school student’s voice in foreign language education research

“…The current study is part of a larger research project exploring the teaching of literature in EFL classrooms in secondary schools in the Netherlands, where literature is part of the common core curriculum (for an overview see Bloemert, Jansen, & van de Grift, 2016;Bloemert et al, 2019). The larger project responds to the movement, within the global context of foreign language education, towards a re-integration of the domains of language and literature teaching (Carter, 2015).…”

“…Although these frameworks may be practical and valuable, we have previously claimed that most of them lack a theoretical foundation (Bloemert et al, 2016). Through investigating EFL classrooms in a secondary school setting and building on previous theoretical understandings we have proposed a Comprehensive Approach to foreign language-literature teaching and learning model (hereafter: Comprehensive Approach) (Bloemert et al, 2016(Bloemert et al, , 2019. The term 'approach' refers to the focus of the EFL lesson where literature is used.…”

“…In order to include this collective voice, at different stages we asked three groups of Dutch secondary school students to answer the following open question: What do you think are the benefits of EFL literature lessons? The students wrote their answers individually and anonymously in bullet points on an A4 piece of paper (see Bloemert et al, 2019 for a detailed report). Our aim with this open question was to move the dialogue back again to a more inclusive and divergent situation (Burbules, 1993).…”

The use of poetry for EFL: Exploring the beliefs of primary school trainees

“…Instead of research designs based on a Likert scale questionnaire, more recent empirical studies such as those by Duncan and Paran (2017) and Bloemert, Paran, Jansen and van de Grift (2019) have surveyed students' perceptions by means of general, open questions about what students think the benefits of EFL literature lessons are (Bloemert et al, 2019). This design was used for the purpose of not inadvertently influencing students' answers.…”

“…In Duncan and Paran (2017) this led participants to mainly acknowledge literature's potential to elicit linguistic competence, while cultural and motivational benefits were brought about to a much lesser extent. Following a similar procedure, Bloemert et al (2019), in contrast, reported a much wider spectrum of advantages which they classified into four main approaches: the language approach (linguistic competence), the text approach (knowledge of the typical stylistic features of literature), the reader approach (personal growth), and the context approach (socio-historical knowledge of the period in which the literary text was written). Even though we agree that surveying non-mediated views can provide valuable insights into students' beliefs, we also consider that asking students to react to specific issues or ideas might also be useful for our specific goals, namely to support or refute available theoretical positions on the use of poetry in EFL.…”