Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 32, Issue 1, 1988

Compared with speaking, writing can be considered to be relatively context independent with regards to both process and product. Young children appear to have problems creating, without interactional support, a discourse that can function as a meaningful whole for a non-present reader. As a result their writing can be contextual dependent in some sense. In this article contextual dependency is discussed on a theoretical level and by illustrating it by means of an example of a seven year old writer. Possible relations between contextual dependency and both cognitive development and individual differences in oral language are considered, and some empirical data are presented that show how frequent and in which ways the texts of beginning writers can be context dependent. From this study it can be concluded that the textuality of young childrens' written products should be defined from the perspective of the child and considering the context in which they were written.

Recent developments in the area of testing have led to fundamental theoretical discussions of the nature of language proficiency and the ways in which it can be measured. The conflict supported by statistical theory between advocates of the unitary competence hypothesis and upholders of the divisible competence hypothesis has not yet been resolved unambiguously. However, the discussion has also offered new perspectives in investigating validity. It has become clear that the way language proficiency is viewed determines at the same time the view of validity. The controversy on construct, face and content validity can only be understood in the light of the different concepts of language proficiency. The implications of these various views both for the development and the use of specific tests forms and for validation and normation are briefly dealt with. The choice of direct proficiency tests is explained and the advantages and disadvantages of some frequently used test forms is discussed.

Writing instruction in American colleges has changed significantly over the last five years. Until the 1980s, the field of composition has been sustained by attention to the written product. Many researchers, however, have moved their focus to the writing process and its rhetorical context. The implications of this paradigmshift have become apparent in the practice of writing programs: many innovative writing programs base their freshman composition courses on 'writing-as-a-process' and 'writing-to-learn' principles.At the University of California, San Diego two writing programs have adopted this approach and they have developed effective composition courses. Although the American college-curriculum is different, these recent developments in writing theory and practice could be quite relevant for Dutch post-secondary education.

In this article an account is given of research concerning vocabulary acquisition in a foreign language and its provisional didactic implications.Until recently, word learning was a neglected aspect of foreign language acquisition. Now, the importance of vocabulary acquisition for high level competence of the foreign language has been recognized and in research growing attention is paid to this aspect. Such research aims at developing a systematically worked-out strategy for teaching and learning words, thereby taking into account insights based on linguistics and on cognitive psychology.More and more linguistic theories no longer consider the lexicon as a collection of individual items, but as a system in which the elements are interrelated and from which they derive their values. The learner will have to be informed about the structure of the lexicon at the syntactic level as well as at the semantic level and about how words function in the foreign language.Vocabulary acquisition research in cognitive psychology mainly focused on mnemonics which are required for paired associative learning. Of greater importance to vocabulary acquisition, however, is research on how the memory functions. In this connection the most important memory theories will be discussed.In discussing the didactic applications of these often speculative insights a distinction is made between techniques which base their approach of vocabulary acquisition on linguistics principles, techniques which make an expUcit difference between a receptive and a productive knowledge of vocabulary and techniques which include presenting words in context.Although it is a step in the right direction in that growing attention is paid to the teaching and learning of foreign vocabulary, there still remains much research to be done, especially at the empirical level.

Increasing use of spontaneous speech data in second language research made it necessary to use other measures than tests for getting insight into the lexical richness of (spoken) text corpora of second language learners. In this article several lexical measures (types, TTR, TTR(c), Guiraud, logTTR, Uber, theoretical vocabulary) are examined and discussed. On the basis of several studies that the TTR is the worst measure possible, but the better measures (types, Guiraud, theoretical vocabulary) are problematic too. Next, the characteristics of the lexical measures are examined by means of a few simple computer simulations with hypothetical lexica. The outcome is that neither the reliability, nor the validity of the different measures are satisfactory, especially with respect to the TTR.

Dutch students of EngHsh at the tertiary level will usually have to pass a pronunciation test of some kind or other if they are to obtain their degree or certification. It is not entirely clear what factors determine their success of failure on these tests. In this study three groups of judges were asked to assess the pronunciation of Dutch lst-year students of English:- British lst-year university students of linguistics;- Dutch lst-year college students of English;- Dutch college teachers of English.They were asked to assess the pronunciation on five 7-point scales:pleasant-unpleasant; ugly-beautiful; broad-cultured; strong accent-no accent; monotonous-melodious.The results of the three groups were compared. The results were also compared with the marks that the students had actually been given after an oral interview test at the end of their first year.It was found that:- the three groups of judges agree on the question whether the pronunciation is monotonous or melodious;- Dutch students are much more positive than the other groups in their judgments on the scal stron accent-no accent;- for the British stude s there is a strong correlation between the three scales unpleasant-pleasant, ugly-beautiful, and monotonous-melodious as well as between the two scales ugly-beautiful and broad-cultured;- there was very little correlation between the British students' judgments on the scale strong accent-no accent and the marks the students had actually been given;- the Dutch students' judgment on the scale broad-cultured correlated most strongly with the actual mark after the lst-year interview test.