Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 61, Issue 1, 1999

The general introduction of this article deals with the quantitative and qualitative differen-ces between the vocabularies of first and second language learners. Quantitative differen-ces concern the number of words 'known' and qualitative differences have to do with the level' of word knowledge, for instance with the way words are embedded in the semantic network or with the proficiency in providing collocations. The second part of the article describes work in progress, i.e. two projects on the quality of word knowledge. The first project is on the acquisition of polysemous words (the knowledge of multiple word meanings). The results of a pilot study are reported. The second project is an educational experiment aiming at improving the deep word knowledge of minority children in their second language ('deep word knowledge' is seen as the knowledge of the various relations between words in the semantic network, especially the conceptual hierarchical relations).

In this study the breadth and depth of lexical knowledge in bilingual Turkish students in the Netherlands is compared to this knowledge in monolingual peers in Turkey. The Dutch students also performed a Dutch test on deep lexical knowledge, i.e. the Word Association Task (WAT).The results show that the bilingual children lag behind their peers in Turkey in both breadth (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) and depth (WAT) of lexical knowledge. Differences in deep lexical knowledge are relatively small compared to the differences in breadth of lexical knowledge. Furthermore, it turns out that the bilingual children's performance on the Dutch WAT is better than on the Turkish WAT.These findings are discussed in the context of transfer of lexical knowledge and the need for adequate vocabulary instruction to (bilingual) children.

The main objective of this study was the exploration of the structural and the temporal development of Berber and Dutch among Moroccan berberophone children of groups one, two and three of primary school in the Netherlands, and the extent to which this development can be related to the children's social context.Children of group one proved to be balanced bilinguals, while those of groups two and three were dominant in Dutch. Both their structural and temporal development was significantly better in Dutch. Dutch development showed to be positively related to the language spoken in interactions with siblings and best friends, degree of 'contact with Dutch native speakers', and school (years spent at school). Berber development appeared to be dependent only on the parents' use of Berber in interactions with their children. With other interlocutors, either at home or at school, Dutch is the dominant, if not the only language used.

This paper reports on the acquisition of word order and subject-verb agreement by adult Turkish learners of Dutch. Five initial state hypotheses were translated into three Mini-malist hypotheses. An evaluation of these hypotheses showed that Minimal Trees and Full Transfer/'Full Access were empirically hardly distinguishable, in spite of the great differences between the original theories. The selection criterion used turned out to be inappropiate to properly evaluate Weak Features' (based on Valueless Features, the Basic Variety and the Initial Hypothesis of Syntax.)Word order in the initial state is probably determined by the word order of L1. The exact analysis for (the) stage(s) preceding target language structure, however, remains unclear. A strong relationship was found between verb morphology and verb movement, but it is unclear how Turks discover this relationship, which does not exist in their mother tongue.

The language learning strategies of adult second-language learners get more important as education concentrates more on individualisation and flexibility. In a multiple case study, it was examined which learning strategies were utilised by some lower educated, second-language learners who were working on their own in a class room, with a system called 'Indiflex' It was concluded that observing is a useful method to make learning strategies operational. Starting learners of Dutch as a second language already turned out to use a broad range of social, cognitive and metacognitive strategies. As learners make more progress in the language, the number of negative strategies (skipping difficult tasks for example) and social strategies (like asking for help) seems to decrease in favour of cognitive and metacognitive strategies like looking something up in a dictionary and deducing a word's meaning from its context.

This study investigates discourse in foreign language classes where the focus is both on form and on meaning, i.e. discourse where students talkin and about the foreign language. Two clasroom activities are analysed. First, language-related questions posed by students in a German as a second language class, and second, text reproduction tasks in a German as a foreign language class at a Dutch secondary school. During these activities students construct and verbalise hypotheses about the structure of the foreign language. It is argued that recording these verbalisations supplies data which allow insights into ongoing learning processes concerning the interaction of the learners' internal L2-knowledge with the perceived L2-input.Both activities are discussed on acquisitional, methodological and didactic levels. It is concluded that they represent significant learning opportunities and that they should be further developed.

A pupil who is a dab hand at technical reading has the ability to recognise words as correctly, quickly and automatically as possible. Initially, the recognition is done by the transposition of each word letter by letter into sounds ('indirect recognition'), but later on without the transposition of letters into sounds ('direct recognition'). Because of many pupils' inability to recognize words correctly, quickly and automatically, I investigated the reading proficiency of pupils of VBO and MAVO. I investigated which English words did cause pronunciation problems: completely regular words ('predictable words') or completely irregular words ('unpredictable words'). Secondly, I investigated whether the pupils had problems with the meaning of the same words, caused by their pronunciation problems. Thirdly, I investigated whether there was a relation between technical reading in Dutch and in English.

In order to provide textbook authors with empirical data on the acquisition in Dutch of written morphology in nouns, verbs and adjectives, several empirical studies have been undertaken. In this article, the third study reports on the performance of the morpheme -e in a special case of adjectives in Dutch: the adjectives derived from participles. The study tries to determine the possible interference between the morphological rules for verb inflection (past tense) and adjective declension in reading and writing. Five classes of adjectives were distinguished according to order of relative difficulty established a priori. Subjects (n=157, grade 6, 7 and 8 from two schools) individually completed a compre-hension and a production task in which factors were systematically varied. Also a recognition test on the spelling of the past tense of verbs was administered.The results showed an effect of categories of verbal adjectives in the production task, but only for groups 7 and 8; group 6 was not sensitive to the differences between the categories. In the recognition task, no effect of type of adjective (verbal or normal) was found for groups 7 and 8; but for group 6, performance on verbal adjectives was lower for the three most difficult categories of adjectives. In the production task, all three groups performed lower on verbal adjectives than normal adjectives in the two most difficult categories of adjectives.It turned out that groups which acquired spelling rules for the past tense of verbs to a higher level, made more errors in the spelling of verbal adjectives, especially in the two categories of adjectives which related the strongest to the spelling of verbs. It was concluded that indications were found that negative transfer or interference is present. Authors recommend changing the order of phases in which spelling rules are trained: from 'adjective declension-verb inflection (past tense)-verbal adjective declension' to 'adjective declension (including verbal adjective declension)-verb declension (past tense).

The interactive self-study programme (called CAVOCA: Computer Assisted VOCabulary Acquisition) is based on generally accepted theories about the mental lexicon (cf. Aitchison's Words in the Mind) and the "levels of processing" theory first advanced by Craik and Lockhart. The programme constitutes a systematic attempt to operationalize the theoretical analysis of the word learning process that recognizes various stages in this same process: learning about the various features of the word, embedding it in various networks, consolidation etc. leading to efficient lexical retrieval. With this end in mind, the words are presented in a variety of L2 contexts, enabling the learner to process the word intensively and facilitating long-term retention. The programme is intended as an alternative to more orthodox word learning techniques such as bilingual word lists with their disappointing long-term retention results. The programme has been contrasted in various experimental (differential treatment) settings with bilingual word lists, and the results confirm the theory concerning the structure of the mental lexicon in that a deeper level of processing results in better long-term retention.

The purpose of this paper is to give an answer to the question if an illocutionary act can be performed with an interjection. Therefore a method of analysis was designed which consists of four elements viz.: determining the communicative function, defining the semantic content, recovering the propositional content and classifying the interjections in the taxonomy of illocutionary acts. Interjections taken from everyday conversations were analysed and the results show that with every interjection uttered, an illoctionary act was performed. These results contradict the commonly held view that interjections are not real words, but merely sounds to give expression to our feelings.