Students' opinions on the benefits of studying English literature at university

Understanding how students view the foreign language (FL) program may be one of the most important steps in curriculum design and lesson planning. This study analyzed the aspect of students' perceptions of the benefits of literature instruction in EFL based on a single open-ended survey conducted with Dutch secondary school students (N = 635) from 15 different schools. This study also aimed to evaluate whether these perceptions differed in any way between the different schools. We paid attention and analyzed the students' policy against by means of the Comprehensive Approach to Foreign Language Literature Learning. The results show that most students see literature in a FL pre-dominantly as language teaching. Moreover, a comparison of the 15 schools showed students' perceptions regarding the benefits of the opportunity offered by the EFL literature varied across the schools. The article ends with some discussion of pedagogical issues and on how the student perspective might be studied on a small scale.