Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 50, Issue 1, 1994

Both men and women use minimal responses. Some studies, however, show functional differences (differences with regard to the organization of a conver-sation) as well as differences in the meaning of these responses (resulting in different paraphrases) between the sexes. For instance, Maltz and Borker (1982) argue that the minimal responses used by women can be interpreted as 'I am liste-ning, go on', whereas the minimal responses used by men can be interpreted as 'I agree with you'. Furthermore, they argue that women use minimal responses more often than men.As a member of the Moluccan (speech) community I was very surprised by these arguments. In the Moluccan speech community many minimal responses are used in daily conversations. According to my intuitions, gender differences in the use of minimal responses do not exist. Furthermore, I argue that the meanings and functions of the minimal responses used by Moluccan speakers are more differentiated than the meanings and functions of the minimal responses found in the literature.To test my intuitive presuppositions I investigated the minimal responses of Moluccan speakers and of Surinam speakers. On the basis of my experience with Surinam speakers I did not believe there to be any gender differences either.In this paper, I focus on the minimal responses that I found in my data. Some of the categories from my data are examined in some detail on the basis of examples. Although the persons participating in this study did not exhibit any gender-related differences, it is hard to conclude one thing or the other, because of the small number of participants. From that point of view this study does not provide any conclusive evidence for the hypothesis that the minimal responses used by Moluccan and Surinam speakers are not gender related, nor does it provide any evidence for the hypothesis that the minimal responses used by Moluccan and Surinam speakers have more functions or meanings than found in the literature. Further research may provide some evidence for the non-existence of gender-related differences in the use of minimal responses by

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Good writers intuitively make the right choices in writing. The book Formuleren ('Formulating'; Onrust et al. 1993) promises to analyse and teach the system on which these choices are based. This paper takes a look at Formuleren's analysis of and advice on the use of the passive, which is, if anything, a highly original approach to a much discussed construction.Formuleren's analysis of the passive is based on the contribution of the auxiliaries worden ('to become') and zijn ('to be') and the past participle, which are said to make the construction more static than its active counterpart, with zijn-passives being more static than worden-passives. In addition, the actor or agent is backgrounded: the event is not presented from the perspective of the agent. The problem with many (zvorden-)passives is that although writers background the perspective of the agent, it is still implicitly there. In order to avoid the often problematic use of the passive, Formuleren suggests that one should look for other verbs that can express roughly the same content but that leave the agent completely out of sight, thus keeping the sentence static, while not presenting it from the agent's perspective.This advice is rahter ambitious. In an experiment, Formuleren's advice to rewrite sentences was tested to find out whether it might perhaps be too difficult for the intended readership of the book (students of Dutch composition and others with a professional interest in written Dutch). This turned out not to be the case; the subjects in the experiment were able to apply it quite well. In fact, they may have applied it too well: some of the subjects remarked that changing all sentences from passive to a Formuleren-altemaúve is no guarantee for a well-written text either. Indeed, some passives are useful and should not be rewritten; however, Formuleren still leaves it to a writer's intuition to determine when to rewrite and when not. In the last paragraph, I suggest a few uses and contexts where the passive functions perfectly well.

In this paper it is argued that, contrary to computational models of language production, in the production system grammatical knowledge takes the form of conventionalized declarative schemes. Such schemes can be identified as a particular function word and an obliged element, for instance, a noun and a determiner. The argument is based on a particular pause pattern observed written language production. A cognitive linguistic account of the notion 'grammatical scheme' is given through a dicussion of Langacker's Usage based model of linguistic knowledge and the 'mental grammar'.

This paper presents the results of a study on the effect of the vocabulary programme Taalplan Kleuters on the vocabulary acquisition of four- and five-year-old non-native speakers of Dutch. The basic question to be answered was the following:What is the effect of a very structured and systematic vocabulary programme like Taalplan Kleuters on the vocabulary acquisition of four- and five-year-old non-native speakers of Dutch in comparison with the effect of the less structured programme Knoop het in je oren for four-year-old non-native speakers of Dutch and Laat wat van je horen for five-year-old non-native speakers of Dutch?"For this study I used four groups of four- and five-year-old children: two experimental groups, one of four-year-olds and one of five-year-olds, and two control groups of the same age. In total 94 children took part in the study, which was conducted in the period from September till December 1993 at a primary school with 450 pupils, 95% of whom were of non-Dutch origin.All the children took two pre-tests: a programme related test (Taalplan Kleuters') and a non-related test ('Passieve en Actieve woordenschattaak' from the 'Taaltoets Allochtone Kinderen'). After these tests the experimental group worked with Taalplan Kleuters. The controlgroup consisting of four-year-old children worked with Knoop het in je oren while the controlgroup consisting of five-year-olds worked with Laat wat van je horen.After three months the children took the same tests again. The results showed that the two experimental groups scored significantly higher on both tests.

This contribution discusses the research questions and preliminary results of a PhD-project carried out at the Free University of Amsterdam. The aim of the project is to gain more insight into the ways in which Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands learn word-order rules of Dutch. The main differen-ce between the languages spoken by the two groups of learners is that Turkish, like Dutch, is an SOV-language, whereas the Moroccan languages (Berber and Moroccan Arabic) are VSO/SVO languages. The central question to be answered is whether all learners, regardless of their mother tongue, go through three acquisitional stages, in which certain word-order rules are acquired as part of a cluster. The idea is that learners build an interlanguage system on the basis of structures they can process; once certain rules are acquired, restructuring of the interlanguage system takes place. This, in turn, may lead to the acquisition of another cluster of rules.In order to be able to answer the research questions, we decided to analyse spontaneous speech samples and to elicite lacking information by means of four experiments. Once the second part will be completed, we hope to be able to decide whether rules are learned as a cluster, which would indicate that restructuring of the interlanguage system has taken place. The first part of the project is mainly aimed at individual language development; this part has not yet been completed. The analysis of spontaneous speech samples was made possible by the Max-Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik in Nijmegen, which made available data of the European Science Foundation Second Language Databank; these data consisted of transcripts of speech samples of 4 Turks and 4 Moroccans, collected over a period of 30 months.The first part of the paper presents some of the theoretical notions employed in second language research, as well as the main rules of Dutch that have to be acquired. Also, the three languages involved in the project are compared. In the next sections the research questions, the design, the data analysis and some interim results are discussed. The main conclusion is that there are indications that certain rules are indeed clustered together, although the different stages are not strictly separated.

This article focuses attention on the question as to which factors could possibly explain the differences in Dutch language performance between Turkish and Moroccan students in the first and third year of secondary education. Students from a representative cohort were tested twice. The complete sample was tested in 1989/90 (n=598), and those students who did not have to repeat a year were again tested in 1991/92 (n=340). Four clusters of background characteristics (34 in total) were studied: student characteristics, family structural characteristics, family cultural characteristics and educational career characteristics. With the aid of correlation and multiple regression analyses the relationships between the background characteristics and test performances were examined. The conclusion was that the results were somewhat disappointing. The most important factor appears to be the recommendation the student receives at the end of his/her primary education. Of the family characteristics, only the 'mother characteristics' appear to be of relevance: her length of stay, education, reading behaviour and the way she talks to her child about matters pertaining to school. As a result, a starting point for improving the educational careers of Turkish and Moroccan children probably lies in the schooling and counselling of the mothers with regard to matters pertaining to school.

This paper describes a study the corrective discourse used by teachers during English language classes at Dutch primary schools. Two observational instruments were used to determine (a) at which points during the intructional interaction children are corrected, and (b) the types of corrective discourse used. The results obtained in this study show that a 6.8% of classroom interaction is devoted to the teacher's corrective discourse. Corrective discourse was found to occur mainly during homework revision, revision exercises, elaboration of new material, guided classwork and revision of exercises done individually. Teachers tended to use elaborate combinations of corrective types and features. Often, learners were encouraged in different ways to correct their own errors. Sometimes, however, teachers merely provided the correct answer.The results presented are a small contribution to our knowledge of error correction in foreign language learning. The instrumentation used in this study could be used as a point of departure for further research.

This article deals with an alternative approach to the problem of the selection of words in foreign language teaching at higher levels. Since frequency as a selection criterion is inadequate beyond the first 2.500 words, it is argued that the question as to how many and which words can only be answered on the basis of quantitative data on the relationship between lexical coverage and text comprehen-sion. Only after establishing what coverage goes with what level of comprehension will it be possible to come forward with valid suggestions concerning the number of words required for reading authentic L2 texts. As to which words, it is argued that these should be selected from a corpus of 10.000 words (beyond the first 2.500) to be constructed on the basis of a combination of selection criteria such as frequency, valency etc. Knowledge of any 5.000 words from this corpus (combined with the first 2.500) will yield such a dense coverage (at least 95%) of general L2 texts that the meaning of any remaining unknown words can be deduced via contextual clues utilisation.To substantiate this claim the results of some experimental investigations of the relationship between coverage and text comprehension are reported.

Recently new objectives have been defined for foreign language teaching in Dutch secondary education. New objectives require new tests; they are one of the means to realize changes in education.A research project was set up to develop a prototype of a speaking proficiency test. The purpose of the test will be to measure the learner's ability to interact effectively in various real-life situations. In this project, Utrecht University and the National Institute of Educational Measurement are working together, making use of each other's know-how in the field of research and test construction.The first stage of the project was to develop a theoretical framework for oral interaction ability. Elements from various disciplines are represented in this framework, such as the parameters of the communicative situation and types of interaction. By means of this framework the learner's aimed language behavior can be analyzed and described.The theoretical framework has been validated by expert judgement. To organize the collecting of the experts judgements, the Delphi technique (Harrell, 1978) was used.In a first round the experts were asked to comment on different aspects of the framework. They did so by answering an open-ended questionnaire. The reactions of the members of the panel were analyzed and summarized. A second questionnaire with reformulated statements was developed and sent to the panel members, together with a brochure with summaries of the answers of all the panel members on the first questionnaire. In the second round the experts were asked to express their agreement or disagreement with the new statements. The outcome was a high degree of agreement on the main issues of the framework.The framework has been modified according to the reactions of the panel members in the first and second round. In this paper the original and the revised versions of the framework for oral interaction are presented and a description of the Delphi procedure is given.

In this article we address the question whether polysemous words are more difficult to translate than monosemous words. If the two different meanings of a polysemous word have to be translated by two different words in the target language, the translator wil have to select the right one. We hypothesized that this choice would make the translation of polysemous words a more demanding task.In our investigation we operationalized the notion of difficulty in terms of response time: Does it take more time to translate polysemous words than to translate comparable monosemous words?We created an experimental setting permitting the measurement in milliseconds of the oral translation of words presented in small disambiguating contexts on a monitor. The experimental material consisted of polysemous words and the same number of monosemous words, which were comparable, by matching, in frequency and meaning.The results of our investigation induced us to adjust our hypothesis: Not all meanings of polysemous words seem to be more difficult to translate than monosemous words. The results showed that the more frequent meanings of the polysemous words were translated at about the same rate as their monosemous counterparts, whereas the translation of the less frequent ones took significantly more time than the translation of the comparable monosemous words.Probably, while translating a polysemous word, the translator goes straight to the translation of the most frequent meaning; when he sees that this translation doesn't fit in the given context, he continues his search for the translation that will fit better in the context.