Schooltaal Thuis: Een meervoudige casestudy naar het taalaanbod van moeders aan hun driejarige kind

In Dutch education, children of Dutch parents with a low educational level lag behind peers with higher educated parents. This can be explained by the language input the former group receives at home, which is thought to prepare them less well for the academic language used in schools than that of the latter group. In this study, interactions between four mothers and their three-year-olds in five speech situations were analyzed to investigate whether mothers with different educational levels did indeed differ in their use of characteristics of academic language and whether the use of these characteristics varied in different speech situations. The language input of the higher educated mothers was found to show more characteristics of academic language than that of the mothers with a lower educational level. For all mothers, their language input showed most characteristics of academic language when they talk about a picture.