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In the Netherlands, as well as in other Western European countries, many minority children are unsuccesful in their school careers. Their lack of achievement is, among other things, due to a language problem which is most probably related to literacy. In vocational education they are faced with the specific task of text comprehension in the content areas, which is a reading task and a learning task at the same time.The study on which will be reported, concerns the assessment of text comprehension in relation to vocabulary and knowledge about some topics of the texts used in the same text-comprehension test. Dutch (L1) and foreign (L2) students were submitted to these tests in the first year of their vocational schooling. It was found that the L2-readers tend towards a top-down way of reading, which implies a stronger reliance on conceptual guidance than in L1-reading.