Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016

Few studies on evaluations of non-native English (NNE) accents by non-native listeners have taken into account degrees of accentedness. This study investigated the perception of moderately and slightly accented English by NNE in an educational context. Eight male speakers recorded two fragments of a lecture in English or Dutch. Experts determined the degree of accentedness of the speakers (moderate, slight, native). In an online questionnaire, 163 Dutch students evaluated the fragments. The moderately accented instructors were evaluated as less comprehensible than slightly accented and native instructors. The Dutch and English fragments were considered equally comprehensible. The moderately accented instructors were regarded less positively than the slightly accented and native English instructors. Slightly accented instructors were evaluated as more likeable than the native English instructors and the instructors in the native Dutch fragments. In conclusion, degrees of accentedness in English influence NNE listeners’ attitudinal evaluations.

In line with recent developments in both language acquisition and text comprehension studies, it is argued that more reliable and valid lexical richness measures can be obtained by including frequency class information. To that end, texts written by 452 elementary school children (L1/L2) in grades 3–6 were investigated. In order to find out whether a frequency class based lexical measure is more valid than type/token based measures, the central question to be answered was whether with increasing vocabulary skills from grades 3 to 6 (measured by standardized vocabulary tests), the number of low frequency words in children’s writings increased, and whether L2-children with lower vocabulary skills used relatively more high frequency words than their L1-peers. The results show a gradually growing number of low frequency words: children in grade 3 use more words belonging to the 1,000–5,000 word frequency range; in grades 4/5 more from the 5,000–12,500 range; and in grade 6 more from the 12,500-plus range. L2-children in all grades use relatively more words from the first frequency class (the first 1,000 lemmas) than their L1-peers. The effect sizes, however, with eta2 ranging from .09 to .02 between grades, and from eta2 = .01 to nonsignificant between L1/L2, were lower than those of the standardized productive and receptive vocabulary tests (eta2 = .26-.35 resp. between grades, eta2 = .34-.23 resp. between L1/L2), and also lower than the effect sizes for the number of different types in the texts (eta2 = .23 between grades, and .01 between NT1/NT2). The TTR shows only a significant difference in the wrong direction (grade 6 outperforming grade 5). The frequency class based lexical measure MLR discriminates significantly both between the grades and between L1/L2, but the effect sizes are low (eta2 = .05 between grades, and eta2 = .02 between L1/L2). These outcomes show evidence that a frequency class based lexical measure as the MLR is more valid than a type/token based measure such as the TTR.

In this paper, Grondelaers and Van Hout’s statement that “the highest nonvirtual stratum of Belgian Dutch is documented by the speech of Belgian teachers” (2011, p. 219) is put to the test. Using production data from two corpora of contemporary spoken Dutch, mixed models binary logistic regression was carried out, focussing on 11 phonological and morpho-syntactic variables. The results show that teachers indeed use significantly less non-standard variants than other highly educated professionals. Moreover, there is also a difference between teachers of Dutch and teachers of other school subjects. By means of an exploratory content analysis of the sociolinguistic interviews, a few possible explanatory factors are discussed: teacher training, hypocorrection, and a difference in linguistic expectations. Especially the latter factor seems to be in play: teachers feel more pressured to adhere to the standard norm than the informants from the ‘laymen’ corpus.

The present study is inspired by the often heard Chinese university level students’ complaint that they do not improve in English proficiency during their university courses. With a pre-post design, the study explores the potential gains in language development in free response data (writing samples) of three groups of L2 learners: a senior high school group and two university groups of different proficiency levels. Four writing samples, two collected at the beginning and two at the end of the students’ respective courses, were scored holistically on general proficiency and analytically on 47 complexity measures in a computerized tool (Synlex Analyzer). The holistic scores showed some improvement over time for the high school group, but not for the university groups. The analytical measures showed improvements in fairly different aspects of the written language for the three groups, suggesting that at different levels of proficiency different variables may develop. The highest level group actually regressed in almost all syntactic variables, but additional hand coded measures point to a subtle move toward a more academic style of writing with more non-finite constructions. The findings suggest that no single complexity measure is robust for all proficiency levels and that for the highest levels, other metrics tapping into inter-clausal complexity should be added.