Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 37, Issue 1, 1990

This contribution gives a global introduction into recent developments in theory and research on individual differences in language learning. It attempts to outline a more general framework for the contributions in this volume on learner differences. The following five questions are focused upon: (A) What kind of theoretical developments can be noticed and which mutual relationships exist between different theoretical models? (B) Which links with other fields of research into differences in human (learning) behaviour can be established? (C) What is the contribution of the factors aptitude and social class in relation to the contribution of factors which can be influenced or manipulated in the school context? (D) How important is the recent interest in cognitive and metacognitive factors and learner and learning strategies? (E) Which important methodological developments can be observed?

This article reports research carried out on experimental teaching material for listening comprehension and for oral production in French, based on a communicative-thematic approach. These materials were developed for Dutch pupils of mixed ability groups in the first stage of secondary education (Jacobs-Hessing 1989).An attempt has been made to take individual differences between pupils into account by means of offering a great variety in course-content and in learning activities. Notwithstanding the variety of these materials, the question remains, whether certain learner characteristics continue to affect the learning process and the learning results.After a review of the literature on the role of learner characteristics in FL-acquisition and after an analysis of the course materials, the following independent variables were selected: motivation, negative fear of failure, field dependence-independence, attitude towards the learning of foreign languages, and prior FL-knowledge. As dependent variables, listening comprehension and oral production tests were devised, used for the interim as well as for the final assignments.Both the classroom and the individual learners' research showed that the domain-specific variable 'prior knowledge' explained substantially more variance in pupils' performance on French tests than the general learner characteristics. Results of individual protocol analyses identified, for each of the assignments in the final test, different types of task approaches. Differences in learning results appear to be due to a combination of specific prior knowledge and the type of task approach. The importance of prior knowledge (especially general skills, knowledge of the world, and FL vocabulary knowledge) is discussed, and recommendations are made regarding the development of thematic communicative material and curriculum research.

This article reports research into the relationschips between four aspects of cognitve style [field(in)dependency, habit-formation, sensitivity to interference, and creativity], and achievement with regard to grammatical competence and oral communicative competence in English.The present investigation also takes into account the relationships between two verbal and two spatial intelligence factors, seven personality traits, attitude to English, socioeconomic background of the pupils, and the intellectual climate at home on the one hand, and the grammatical and communicative achievements on the other.The most important results are presented and discussed.

In the study of the use of context and reading comprehension in a foreign language by Van Esch (1987) a more explorative research question dealt with the relation between the performances of learners of Spanish in context use and reading comprehension on the one hand and affective variables as the learners' perception of their attitude, their self-confidence and their context use in reading-comprehension on the other. These variables were measured by questionnaires of the Likert-type. To improve reliability and empirical validity, factor-analyses were carried out which yielded three factors: Attitude, Self-Confidence and Context-Use. The learners with better than average results on context-use and reading comprehension (the 'good' context-users) proved to be also more than average in these three factors. After a training programme in context-use, the perceptions of an experimental group of less than average ('poor') context-users were significantly higher in two of the three factors, Attitude and Context-Use, than the perceptions of a control group of poor context-users who did not follow this training programme. The third factor, Self-Confidence yielded contradictory results.Conclusions are drawn from the results of this study, which ends with an examination of the implications for the theory and practice of the teaching of foreign language reading comprehension.

Within the larger framework of a project on Mixed Ability Teaching, a qualitative experiment was carried out with respect to the individual differences between pupils of very different ability ranges, when learning French. This experiment was meant to gain insight into the nature of the differences concerning vocabulary learning and reading strategies.69 pupils (12-15 year) pupils of very different ability ranges (but being educated together) were presented with a variety of vocabulary learning and reading tasks. They worked individually or in pairs and were requested to think aloud. The following tasks were used: 1) while reading a story, guessing the meaning of unknown words from the context, 2) after having read a story, memorizing the meaning of unknown words by means of vocabulary cards, 3) intensive reading of a relatively difficult illustrated story, 4) recalling the meaning of new words incidentally acquired (or not), while reading a story, 5) doing an exercise, involving different reading strategies.The analysis of the protocol records focused on the causes of the differences between weak and strong pupils. The differences which were found could be related to two relevant general strategies: guessing the meaning of an unknown word from the context and analyzing the word form of an unknown word. The main results were the following: 1) the attention of weak pupils tends to be exclusively drawn by one source of information; weak pupils are not able to integrate information from different sources (advance knowledge, text, word forms, context, illustrations, cues), 2) weak pupils take no account whatsoever of the sentence structure, 3) weak pupils have difficulties in generalizing from a new word to an already known word (in the target language or in the mother tongue). The article concludes with some implications for foreign language teaching.

The article centres around the questions of how the written form of words in a foreign language is normally acquired, and how the learning process of dyslexic pupils can be described.A phase model is presented of the way reading and writing are learnt in the mother tongue, incorporating several strategies: the logographemic, alphabetical, orthographic and direct strategies.The research reported on leads to the following conclusions:1. the strategies outlined in the mother tongue model can also be recognized in the foreign language;2. the model offers the possibility of describing the learning process in the foreign language in phases, too;3. the errors made by weak spellers differ quantitatively, not qualitatively, from those made by normal spellers.

In the Federal Republic of Germany a discussion is going on about the role of teaching the mother tongue. This paper presents part of the data from a project presently carried out at the University of Essen (FRG). They consist of language tests (C-tests) in both the mother tongue of the students and German, as well as of a social survey investigating the students' attitude to school, the social situation and the language spoken at home, etc.The sample was taken from three nationalities. 1200 Greek, Turkish and Yugoslavian students were tested (400 for each nationality) aged between 10 and 16 (5th. to 10th. grade in the German school system). The sample was grouped into sets of two grades (5th, 6th. 7th., 8th. and 9th andl0th grade in the German school system) in each nationality.The language data confirm that supporting the mother tongue has no bad effects on the acquisition of the second language.

Evaluation of the effect of mother tongue teaching to migrant children in the Netherlands. Data are presented on first- and second-language proficiency of the Turkish sample (n=368). The aim of the investigation was to find out to what extent learner characteristics influence proficiency scores. It is concluded that the correlation between first and second-language proficiency is particularly low, which does not support Cummins' interdependency hypothesis. Interestingly parents' interest in school is an important global factor. Age on arrival appears to be of little importance for scores on the first-language tests. This suggests that children who have lived in the Netherlands for most of their lives, still show a continued development of their mother tongue.

Most immigrant children in the Netherlands are second or third generation immigrants. For children from Antillian or Aruban parents (the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba are former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean) this is quite different. Many of these children of pre-school or primary school age are first generation children.This article reports a study on effects of immigration on school achievement, motivation and abstract problem solving skills of 56 Antillian and Aruban immigrant children in the age range of ten to thirteen. These children were compared with a group of 121 Dutch pupils and with a group of schoolchildren living in Curaçao, the largest island of the Netherlands Antilles. The number of children from the latter group varied per test.It was hypothesized that immigration would have a disturbing effect on the relationschip between scores on a variety of measures. The normal picture in schools is that good pupuls generally achieve well on a range of performance tests, whereas the less capable pupils do less well on these tests. This is what we call a homogeneous learning profile. Disturbance manifests itself in a break-down of this homogeneity. What results are heterogeneous learning profiles: a pupil may achieve well on a particular measure, but this does not tell us anything about achievements on other measures. Homogeneous learning profiles are what teachers often expect. In the Netherlands there is a form of special education especially for children with strongly heterogeneous learning profiles.Both in the group of Dutch children and in the group of Curaçaon children the corelations between measures were rather strong and in the expected direction. These children had, as we expected, homogeneous learning profiles. In the group of Curaçaon and Aruban immigrant children we distinguished pupils by their age of arrival in the Netherlands: up to six years old and from six years old. This latter group (43 pupils) clearly had less homogeneous learning profiles. It did not make a difference whether the scores on the vocabulary test or the scores on the spelling test were taken as a reference point. Actually we had expected differences between these two reference points, assuming that vocabulary development in Dutch is more strongly affected by non-school circumstances than spelling. Non-school circumstances may greatly vary between immigrant children, depending on how their families cope with the new living situation.The learning profiles of the children with a younger age of arrival resembled more closely the profiles of native Dutch and native Curaçaon children, suggesting that the disturbance of learning profiles is a temporary matter.Possible explanations for the findings and practical implications are discussed.

The results of a secondary analysis of the relationships between Dutch language proficiency and educational attainment of Dutch primary school children with different ethnic backgrounds are presented. Three groups of pupils are studied: 32 monolingual speakers of the Dutch standard language, 75 bilingual children speaking a Dutch dialect and standard Dutch and 39 bilingual non-indigenous children belonging to different ethnic groups. All children started their school career in the Netherlands. Main results are 1) the structure of Dutch language proficiency is equal for the three groups; 2) the effects of parental class on language proficiency differ between the three groups; 3) the effects of Dutch language proficiency on educational attainment are equal for the three groups and 4) 75% of the differences in Dutch language proficiency and school success can be explained by differences in social class.

This article reports findings from a survey among a representative sample of 500 adult inhabitants of the city of Rotterdam. The survey was conducted in 1989 in order to estimate the incidence of functional illiteracy among Rotterdam adults. The measures of literacy levels gained in this investigation were essentially based on subjects' self-reports. In this article some results for the 62 immigrant bilingual subjects are discussed and compared with those for a random subsample of 84 indigenous monolingual Dutch subjects, concerning the levels of literacy and the linguistic, social and educational background. It is concluded that the acquisition of literacy skills poses to both indigenous lower-class subjects and immigrants largely comparable problems, which can be traced back to the dominant functions and uses of oral and written language in the social environment in which they grew up. Detrimental influences of bilingualism can in a large part be interpreted by these shared socio-cultural factors. However, especially with respect to epistemologically complex reading and writing in Dutch, bilingualism still has a direct negative effect on adult literacy, suggesting that insufficient development of metalinguistic knowledge, such as knowledge of the lexicon and the phonological and syntactic system of Dutch, is a major cause of the associated type of illiteracy - called 'cultural illiteracy'.