Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 68, Issue 1, 2002

Until recently, studies about adults' metalinguistic knowledge nearly always dealt with adult readers. Since explanations about the development of children's metalinguistic knowledge are not conclusive about the influence of either (language) development or experience with written language. Adult illiterates form a nice test case for these contrasting hypotheses, since they are both experienced language users and inexperienced in the written code.Therefore, a research project was carried out to compare the metalinguistic knowledge of adult illiterates with another group of non-readers (young children) and with low-educated adult readers.The research project was carried out with 24 young pre-readers, 25 adult (true) illiterates and 23 adult readers with about four years of schooling. All groups were offered different tests of metalinguistic awareness on the phonological, lexical/semantic and discourse-level of language. Analysis of variance and posthoc analyses showed that, on the whole, there were hardly any differences between young children and all adults in the knowledge of linguistic entities (favouring the developmental hypotheses) while there were many significant differences between the no-nreaders on the one hand (both children and adults) and low-educated literates on the other hand. It is concluded that experience with writing systems plays a major role in triggering metalinguistic knowledge.

In this paper, the question is raised as to what extent language awareness can contribute to second-language acquisition. It is argued here that adults (without skills in any other language than their mother tongue) acquiring a second language undergo a process of increasing language awareness when they learn a second language without any formal instruction. Confronted with an unknown language the code of which they have to crack without any help, these learners seem to become aware of the features of their own language before they focus on the structure of the new language. There is no direct access to this process of language awareness, but I believe that double constructions and self-corrections produced by these learners provide evidence that they become aware of differences between L1 and L2. Finally, it is suggested that noticing and input enhancement, even some explicit contrastive information on L1-L2 differences (which spontaneous learners try out to find for themselves) might benefit L2 learners who are unaware of the fact that they still use an L1 grammatical system.

This article reports an experiment in which mental imagery was used as a mnemonic strategy to enhance learners' retention of figurative idioms. Language students in tertiary education were provided with on-line exercises on 120 English idioms. Under the experimental condition, participants were presented with multiple-choice exercises in which they were asked to hypothesise about the etymological origin of the given idioms. This task was meant to elicit mental imagery. Under the control condition, participants were presented with traditional multiple-choice exercises in which they were asked to identify the correct figurative meaning of the idioms. Retention was measured one week later by means of a gap-fill exercise in which the participants were asked to produce the keywords of the idioms in context. The results of the experiment suggest (i) that mental imagery can be a powerful mnemonic strategy, and (ii) that this strategy generates superior recall, especially with regard to etymologically rather transparent figurative idioms, even though processing these may require relatively little cognitive effort.

In this article, we discuss the mixed input offered by four profoundly deaf mothers and the mixed output of their deaf and hearing children. Muysken (2000) distinguishes different forms of code-mixing: insertion, alternation and congruent lexicalisation. We applied these definitions to these language data and found that the mothers used mainly the last type of code-mixing, namely congruent lexicalisation. This results in a mixed form of NGT (Nederlandse Gebarentaal, 'Dutch Sign Language') and Dutch, in which the structure of the utterance is grammatical in both NGT and Dutch. Lexical insertion also occurs, both in the basically NGT utterances and in the Dutch utterances. The deaf children (up to age three) are just beginning to become bilingual and hardly produce any mixed utterances. The hearing children, on the other hand, clearly show that they code-mix, under the influence of the language input.

In order to prepare children from disadvantaged backgrounds for primary education, early intervention programs are used. Generally, a distinction is made between two types of intervention activities: those which are conducted at home (family-based activities) and those which are conducted in, for example, preschools (center-based activities). This research project tries to establish whether there is a relation between participation in early intervention activities and the educational achievements of 119 pupils from the cities of Tilburg and Waalwijk. A comparison is made between four groups of children: a group that took part in the family-based program Opstap Opnieuw, a group that went to preschool, a group that did both, and a control group. The performances of these four groups are followed during the first years of primary education. In addition, an estimate is made of the influence of family characteristics on the effectiveness of both types of intervention activities.

The aim of 'Interaction in a small circle with teacher' is to stimulate the development of young students' language skills by the active participation in school conversation and to let them use more complex cognitive language functions. Students think about phenomena, processes or problems and put their thoughts into words. The teacher should play a coaching role. He stimulates further thinking and talking by students. Research shows that students use more complex cognitive language functions when they participate in 'Interaction in a small circle with teacher' than in traditional school activities. If the teacher provides appropriate opportunities to students by asking open questions, such as why? and how?, students use more complex language functions. There seems to be a positive connection between the teacher's role and the language skills of students.

In this paper, we investigated, for 90 Dutch L1 and L2 children in Special Education, whether differences in Dutch language proficiency could be found between boys and girls, and whether the outcomes are in line with the evaluations of the teachers about the proficiency of these boys and girls. From the different proficiency tests (on articulation, vocabulary, and morphological, syntactical and textual abilities) and the spontaneous speech analyses (on the same aspects of proficiency), no differences between boys and girls emerge. However, the teachers evaluate the girls, in particular the Dutch L1 girls, as significantly more proficient than they are according to the tests and spontaneous speech data, and they evaluate the boys, in particular the Dutch L2 boys, as significantly lower than they perform on the tests and spontaneous speech data. In the final section, some explanations are discussed why teachers think that girls are more proficient than boys.

We investigated the influence of the language of writing (L1 versus L2) and the condition of writing (direct writing vs. writing via translation) on generic (obligatory and compositional) elements and discourse patterns (idea units and speech act functions) of texts composed by L2 writers with different proficiency levels in L2. The novelty of this investigation is the pragmalinguistic analysis of the texts produced by L2 writers. In our analysis, we concentrate on higher levels of text representation. The texts composed by L2 writers are advertisements of products and services. To avoid as much as possible an exercise- and educational effect, we had to find a task that for all participants would be novel but realistic, motivating, and feasible. Writing an advertisement seemed to fulfil these requirements best. A total number of 20 participants engaged in the data collection procedure, ten of whom were short-residence beginners and ten were long-residence advanced L2 users.Each participant was asked to write three advertisements in the following order of conditions: Directly in Dutch (L2d-text); Directly in Russian (Lid-text) and Translation from Russian into Dutch (L2t-text). We did not look for "reverse" transfer explicitly. However, some evidence was found for a reverse transfer hypothesis in our data, especially for the long-residence group. The results of our study show that advanced L2 writers produced direct Russian texts (Lid-text) with higher total numbers on all analyzed elements than beginning L2 writers. Their texts consist of more idea units and contain a greater variety of speech act functions.Another tendency is that long-residence L2 writers elaborate more in the direct L2 condition than in the L2 translation condition. This finding contradicts the results of the study by Kobayashi (1984), which is surprising because L2 writers elaborate most in the condition in which they had to combine cognitive higher-order processing with lower level grammatical and lexical processing during writing.