Open Vragen: Antwoorden in de Vreemde Taal?

The new exams for text comprehension at upper secondary level in the Netherlands will include open questions, besides the traditional multiple choice ones. It has been provisionally suggested that these open questions should be answered in LI (Dutch) rather than L2. But is L2 a serious handicap? In this research project, 67 Dutch students at pre-exam level were asked to take the same text comprehension test for English, 35 of them with questions and answers in Dutch, and 32 with questions and answers in English. The scores turned out to be roughly equal for the two groups. A similar (but much more limited) project for German showed considerable differences between the Dutch and the German groups.