Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 66, Issue 1, 2001

Home-based intervention programs should not only offer all those qualities that are required for every intervention program for youngsters, but also have to take care that they can be used by low-educated, sometimes illiterate parents. A fact that must also be taken into account is that parent-child interaction in many families of ethnic minorities take place in other languages than the dominant language of education at school. For these reasons, the Dutch home-based program Opstap Opnieuw (Step-up Anew) has tried to combine rich contents with simple procedures and has been developed in four different languages, Dutch, Turkish, Arabic, and Papiamentu. The focus in this article is on the criteria behind the combined requirements of high-quality interaction, suitability for low-educated parents, and versions in four different languages, especially for language development and emergent literacy. In addition, some outcomes of the first evaluations are presented.

This paper deals with the question in which respects L1 acquisition differs from L2 acquisition. For this purpose, the way children learning Dutch as their mother tongue acquire possessive constructions is compared to how children and adults learning Dutch as a second language acquire them. The comparison is restricted to the third person role as possessor. Although L1 and L2 learners have many learner variants in common, L2 learners - both children and adults - are initially guided by the structure of their mother tongue. The influence of the L1 can even be resistent for a long time in the preference of one of the two possessive patterns of Dutch. A more conspicuous outcome is that young children are much more susceptibe to weak pronouns in the environmental input and use them at an earlier time than adults and older children.

In the education of Dutch as a Second Language, frequent use is made of paper-based tests. In this contribution, we describe how an adaptive test was constructed on the basis of an item bank which already existed and test items that were written specifically for use in a computer test. Several advantages of a computer adaptive test are dealt with. We describe how field tests for Reading and Listening were carried out in order to scale the test items, using a One Parameter Logistic Model. In addition, research that was carried out on the basis of questionnaires clearly demonstrates that the computer test is satisfying for the students, as test results are immediately available to them. Teachers seemed to need some time to get used to the computer test, but they also stated that the computer test accurately reflected language levels of their students.

This study is part of a research project that investigates what problems pupils may have with language used in mathematical textbooks. Based on earlier research, the expectation is that minority pupils will have problems on micro and mesolevels of texts. The focus of this article is on the microlevel of texts. The mathematical textbook that is used for analysis is based on the ideas of Realistic Mathematics Education. In this view of education, mathematics must be connected to reality, so mathematical problems are presented in a practical context. First, the mathematical textbook was analysed on vocabulary. On the basis of this analysis of the textbook, it can be safely concluded that Realistic Mathematics Education makes strong demands on the vocabulary abilities of pupils. Mathematical texts feature many words that are not in the list of most elementary Dutch words and many of these words are difficult and have a low frequency. Second, the vocabulary of the textbook was compared to the vocabulary employed by the teacher during classroom discussions. From these analyses the conclusion may be drawn that every day words from the mathematical textbook that were used to describe the contexts were hardly used by the teacher in classroom interaction. However, the teacher did use many words from the category of mathematical words. This means that, while infrequent every day words used to describe the contexts may cause problems for pupils, the verbally presented realistic contexts are hardly discussed in class. Overall, this micro analysis reveals that the words used in mathematical texts may well pose problems for pupils, especially the infrequent every day words used to describe the realistic contexts, Further research will focus on whether minority pupils have problems with the way mathematical exercises are presented and, if so, what these problems are.

This paper describes an investigation into the relation between the results of a newly developed test of deep word knowledge (DWK) and a series of other word knowledge tests as well as a writing task. The DWK consists of 63 items constructed along the following model: one stimulus plus 6 responses. Each stimulus belongs to one of five frequency classes. The responses are not less frequent than the stimulus word. Students are to pick out the responses which bear a relationship to the stimulus word. Dutch students studying French in their first, second and third year and 26 French 17-year-old high school pupils took the test. The result showed that it has a strong discriminatory power between the groups. The results of the DWK were compared to a broad word knowledge test administered to the first-year students and yielded a high and significant correlation. Comparison with another deep word knowledge test, based on the EURALEX French tests and administered to the third-year students, showed a smaller and non significant correlation. This lower correlation may be due to the greater homogeneity of the group of third-year students. The first- and third-year students did a written assignment, which was scored along a rough scoring model. A t-test showed that the third-year students performed significantly better than the first-year ones. Correlations between the scores of the deep word knowledge test and the writing task were found to be high and significant. This is mainly due to the correlation for the first-year students. The smaller correlation for the third-year group is possibly due to the greater homogeneity. Another explanation could be that the scores for writing for third-year students are more strongly influenced by factors other than word knowledge such as style, text structure and text markers, as well as more complex sentences. It could also be the case that the third-year students' texts show a lexical richness, including rare words, which is not covered by the DWK

This article reports on an experiment in which the Yes/No vocabulary test is used with French-speaking learners of Dutch. In previous experiments with Francophone subjects the data were characterised by high false alarm rates which may be due to a response bias. In the current experiment, we aim to get a better picture of the influence of the instruction on the subjects' response behaviour. Two groups of learners received a Yes/No vocabulary test that differed only in the formulation of the instruction. The test was followed by a translation task in order to obtain a concurrent validation. It is shown that a stringent instruction leads to a significant decrease of the false alarmrate. However, it did not result in a higher concurrent validation. These results illustrate the need for a formula that can take into account the response bias. Signal Detection Theory is described as a theoretical model that allows an explicit distinction between response bias and vocabulary proficiency. However, specificities of the Yes/No task have to be considered in order to gain sufficient insight into the merit of the model.

The use of video in foreign language teaching is considered to be a powerful tool by many teachers and researchers. It seems, however, that a sound 'video teaching methodology' has not yet been fully developed. This article sets out to present some reflections on the advantages of the use of video. We will then briefly describe some elements from two more or less theoretical studies, Lang (1995) and particularly Paivio (1986), and discuss the results of other experiments that we found in the literature. Finally, we will put forward some tentative ideas about experiments that we will prepare on the basis of the most important findings of other experiments. The main idea is that information is best processed if it is presented in a redundant way, e.g., both by an audio and a video channel. Many experiments claim that reversed subtitling (subtitles not in L1, but in L2 or FL) is the most successful visual support for foreign language learners. Our experimental design will be organized as follows. Subjects (pre-university students and first-year university students of French) will be divided into four experimental groups to be tested under four different conditions: 1) Image, sound (French spoken text), no subtitles; 2) Image, no sound, French subtitles; 3) No image, sound, subtitles; 4) Image, sound, subtitles. We hypothesize that condition 4 will yield the best result, but before conducting the experiment, we will have to examine three aspects: 1) The assessment format: subjects might consider open questions unclear, whereas, in closed questioning (true-false, multiple choice, cloze), items might be biased by the test constructor. 2) Clarifying the distinction between high, medium, and low redundancy. 3) Bi- or multimodal information input may lead to cognitive overload.

Cultures differ from each other with respect to the relative importance they attach to certain values. Since values play an important role in advertising, it is interesting to study whether appealing to a value that is important in one culture, but not in another culture, is more persuasive in the former culture than in the latter. Two different versions of an advertisement for a fictitious brand of watch were constructed in Dutch and then translated into Spanish. The first version of the ad appealed to values that are considered to be important in Dutch culture, i.e., 'adventure' and 'excitement'; the second version appealed to values that are assumed to be important in Spanish culture, i.e., 'security' and 'certainty'. Each version of the ad was judged by about 50 respondents in the Netherlands and in Spain. The results show that the ad appealing to security was more persuasive for people who value 'security' more than they value 'excitement', whereas the ad appealing to excitement was more persuasive for people who value 'excitement' more than 'security'. However, there was no interaction between the type of appeal and the nationality of the participants because the value hierarchies of the Spanish participants did not differ from those of the Dutch participants.