Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 14, Issue 1, 1982

Throughout the 20 years of its existence the Council for Cultural Co-operation of the Council of Europe has promoted language learning as a means to the freer movement of people and ideas. Stress has been laid on interpersonal communication and learner-centred educational structures and processes. Planning involves specification of objectives appropriate to learner needs and the realities of the educational situation. An account is given of the recent work of Modern Languages Project no. 4 and the prospects for the forthcoming Project no. 12, which will focus on teacher training in respect of attitudes, knowledge and skills, both linguistic and educational.

This article aims at presenting a synopsis of what has been going on in the field of developing and updating the aims of foreign-language instruction in the Netherlands since the early 1960s. In six paragraphs it describes the framework of educational planning at different levels and the problems the planners find themselves up against. It also deals with the question as to what are the preferable terms in which language-teaching aims are to be described (e.g. in terms of skills or in terms of language use) and with the various ways in which different organizations, curriculum planners and in-dividual schools have attempted to implement their (often implicit) views about how foreign-language teaching is to be updated. The article concludes with a number of recommendations for curriculum planners.

In a research project conducted at the Institute for Applied So-ciology of the Catholic University of Nijmegen, an attempt has been made to arrive by means of a structured decision procedure at a choice of objectives for foreign language teaching in gene-ral secondary schools and at an analysis of the arguments and criteria that play a role in the decision process.A panel of experts (teachers and others) had to make a choice out of a list of 18 possible objectives, formulated in terms of language use situations.On an abstraction scale going from general to operational, these objectives can be characterized as concrete objectives, that ha-ve an external and an internal function in education.External because they are intended to inform those who have to make choices in the educational system, choices concerning subjects and school types.Internal, because they have to indicate directions for curriculum development and for the construction of tests.The state of our knowledge about relationships between language use and situational variables does not allow a completely syste-matic derivation of language forms and content from descriptions of situations.The usefulness of these objectives lies also else-where: in being more precise than the official school and exami-nation programs and more generally accessible than the operatio-nal objectives that are the actual tests.

As a test of oral proficiency for the higher levels, the interview seems very popular, but it is rather expensive, and psychometrists question its value.In this article, we discuss an alternative test of oral production, consisting of three parts; each part has a different form:part 1 - questions with key-words in the native language that delimit the content of the answer ( ± 4 1/2 min.);part 2 - questions about some fragments of picture stories ( ± 7 1/2 min.);part 3 - interview questions ( ± 6 1/2 min.).The test takes its content from the teaching syllabus and students can prepare for it.The answers of the students are recorded in the language laboratory and raters score these answers recorded on tape; each of the three parts of the test is scored by different rater: this offers the advantage of reducing the scoring task, yet every student will be rated by three different raters. The raters score separately each of the answers; for each part of the test, ten scores are given, so the final score is the sum of 30 item-scores. Rater reliability and inter-item consistency of this test for French as a second language were satisfactory: .894 and .901; still, two different groups of raters would take a different pass-fail decision with regard to one out of every seven students. In our opinion, time can be saved in order to discuss more thoroughly these really difficult cases: as the reliability of a test consisting of the two parts 1+3 or 2+3 were also rather satisfactory, the most economical solution is to score only two parts of the tests of all students; only if the first two raters disagree or if the two partscores are near the pass-fail borderline, a third rater should rate the third part and, after discussion, decisions can be taken.In their evaluation of the test, the majority of the students appeared to appreciate the varied form of the test and to agree on the idea of an oral production test that takes its content from the syllabus and that can be prepared for.

Pupils of foreign origin need proficiency in both oral and literate skills to succeed in the Dutch secondary school system. In this article the development of literate skills in L-1 and L-2 is examined.The way in which a second language is learned is influenced by the level and type of mother tongue competence. In the case of older learners a higher proficiency in L-1 can facilitate the L-2-acquisition process. Especially language skills based upon cognitive development are expected to be transferred from L-1 to L-2 (Cummins, 1979,1980), which is the reason why reading was chosen as the object of this study.The study compares two groups of Turkish secondary school pupils, one group consisting of pupils who learned Dutch at a relatively early age, the other of pupils who had just arrived in the Nether-lands. The latter are expected to have a higher competence in Turkish than the former when starting to learn Dutch. For both groups a positive relation has been found between Turkish and Dutch for technical reading and reading comprehension.The findings suggest not only a positive transfer from L-1 to L-2 but also from L-2 to L-1 in the case of the group of pupils who had hardly been taught in L-1 and arrived in The Netherlands at an earlier age. Positive transfer seems to occur especially in reading comprehension provided that there is a certain level of competence in both languages.