Holding it up to the light: Examining approaches to EFL poetry teaching in secondary education in the Netherlands

Abstract

As interest grows for the potential benefits of using literature in language learning, poetry's role within the landscape of foreign language education remains unclear. Therefore, the present study seeks to investigate the didactic practices of English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers when teaching poetry in the Netherlands. Using an online questionnaire and data collected from interviews, this research explores the extent to which secondary school EFL teachers align their practices with the four approaches to literature instruction identified by Bloemert et al. (2016): the text, context, reader and languages approaches. The findings of this study indicate that teachers predominantly use the reader, text and context approaches, putting comparatively less emphasis on the language approach overall. These results suggest that more attention should be given to the language approach in EFL poetry lessons in order to achieve a more comprehensive poetry teaching pedagogy. Additionally, this study found that HAVO classes are expected to engage in less literary analysis than VWO classes, and at a more superficial level. Furthermore, teachers perceive the reader approach as more suitable for HAVO classes.