Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 56, Issue 1, 1997

The research reported on in this paper concerns the role of television in the lexical acquisition of a foreign language. Twenty higher educated adult learners of Dutch as a foreign language watched a 15-minute compilation of the educative television programs Klokhuis and Lucht. By means of a pre-post-test-design, it was examined whether the subjects learned words by watching and listening to the television programs.The results indicated a significant learning effect, which persisted after a one-week time interval. There was also a tendency for the learning effect in the ten students who watched with explicit word-learning instruction (intentional learning) to be stronger than the learning effect in the students who watched without instruction (incidental learning). The learnability of a word was neither positively influenced by the visual support as extra contextual cue, as offered by television, nor by the number of times a word was offered in the television fragments.It was concluded that television could play an important role in the lexical acquisition of Dutch as a foreign language.

With adults, many words in the memory are ordered on the basis of semantic relations. Especially co-ordinative relations between words (dog-cat) are strongly represented. In a child's lexicon, this arrangement is not clearly present yet.Studies into the development of lexical organization of normally developed children by means of word association tasks, have shown that co-ordinative relations are already present in a child's lexicon at an early stage (Eibers et al., 1993). However, these can only be addressed directly in a certain context (Contrast Association). The co-ordinations are not available independently yet (Free Association). This suggests that co-ordinative relations of adults have a contrastive origin.In these studies the development of lexical organization of children with a cognitive deficiency has been looked at. The group to be examined consists of 42 pupils. It has been examined whether their lexical organization deviates from normally developed children. A comparison with adults has been made as well. These studies consist of two kinds of word association: Free Association and Contrast Association.The most important findings point out that children with a cognitive deficiency do not deviate from normally developed children as far as their reactions in Free Association are concerned. Both groups of children mention the same small number of co-ordinations. With respect to the Contrast Association, however, the children with a cognitive deficiency mention considerably less co-ordinations than normally developed children. With the children with a cognitive deficiency, this results in a smaller number of co-ordinations in the Contrast Association, but apparently not in a smaller number of co-ordinations in the Free Association.

This paper reports on an analysis of the validity of instruments used to measure aspects of language acquisition. In essence, this paper deals with the degree to which the instruments are an adequate reflexion of the theoretical construct. The relation between theoretical construct and its operationalization is central to the analysis into the validity. Therefore Pienemann's Processability Theory (1994) which is used as a basis for the operationalization is outlined. A description is also given of the development of the instruments for grammatical aspects of language acquisition. The analysis to the validity of the instruments showed that the instruments used mainly measure the grammatical aspects. Although the correlation between the grammatical aspects is very high, the instruments are not necessarily invalid.

In reading research, it has regularly been claimed that the signalling of coherence relations by means of connectives (However, because) or signalling phrases (The solution to this problem is...) facilitates the processing of expository texts and increases recall from texts. In this paper a reading experiment is presented that aimed at the role of signalling in both L1 (first language) and L2 (second language) reading. Twenty-three Dutch university students who had specialised in Italian language and literature participated in the experiment. Two variables were manipulated: signalling (implicit vs. explicit) and the language in which the text was written (Dutch vs. Italian). Subjects read two expository texts, either in L1 or in L2, verified statements, and were given both an immediate and a delayed free-recall task. The results showed a positive tendency towards a signalling effect in both the L1 and the L2 conditions.

Research into language attrition was started in Nijmegen in 1982. The initiative was inspired by an American conference held in 1980, the proceedings of which were published in The loss of language skills (Lambert, R. & Freed, B. (eds.). Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1982).Language attrition research in general aroused a great deal of interest in the Netherlands as well as in other countries. The question what happens to foreign-language skills learned at school was - and still is - considered particularly relevant. This is a phenomenon that most Dutch people know from personal experience: one learns French at school for a number of years, but when one wants to book a hotel room a number of years later, one is lost for words.The original research question was: how much is lost and what is lost? Fifteen years and a number of projects later, we have come to the understanding that things are not as bad as we thought, in the Netherlands at least, for the subjects and skills we tested. Time and again, we found that the skills tested remained intact across very long periods of time and in some cases even improved, even if there had been hardly any exposure to the target language.This paper presents an overview of the findings obtained in fifteen years of Nijmegen research into language attrition, leading to possible avenues for research in the next fifteen years.

The results are presented of a study in which sociolinguistic language use patterns and structural characteristics of the language of three generations of Dutch immigrants to New Zealand were investigated. Language maintenance is defined as the maintenance of the L1 at one or more levels of language use, while language shift can be defined as the change in language use by an individual or a group of speakers. In a sociolinguistic questionnaire, the subjects had to report on their use of the Dutch language in domains inside and outside the home. An oral interview was conducted to establish the amount of structural language loss. The results were found to support the hypothesis based on earlier work (e.g. De Bot & Clyne, 1994; Folmer, 1991) that predicted a high level of intra- and intergenerational languageshift. Structural-linguistic language loss was found to be limited, which is also in line with other findings.

Policy and research are confronted with a growing indistinctness with regard to the definition of ethnic minorities. It proves to be more and more difficult to identify this category in a unambiguous way. The present article describes several indicators of ethnicity and relates them to each other. These indicators relate to the situation of the parents, viz. country of birth, nationality, self-identification, home language, language proficiency and also educational level. The indicators are correlated bivariate and multivariate to the language proficiency of their children. The national representative sample analyzed consists of 7,197 pupils in group 4 (age 8-9) of primary education. The results of the analyses show that the use of different indicators leads to very big differences in size of the category of ethnic minorities. It becomes clear that the home language criterion (i.e. the language the parents speak to each other) offers good prospects as an indicator of ethnicity and a predicator of differences in language proficiency. The practical value of the criterion, however, seems more important for research than for policy.

In the second-language classroom the teacher determines to a high degree the input and feedback L2-learners receive. Feedback informs learners of the accuracy of their production, after which they may alter their hypotheses about the target language. The role of feedback has been investigated from different theoretical points of view and there has been some research on its effect. However, most of these studies concern adults; hardly any research has focused on young children.In this article, I will discuss some of the literature about which feedback strategies are suitable for the SLA by non-native children in kindergarten. I will also summarize the results of the analysis of 18 lessons in kindergarten groups in which more than 90% of the children are non-native speakers, to determine which strategies teachers actually use. I will compare twelve different teachers, two age groups, two different vocabulary methods and two kinds of lessons.