Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 70, Issue 1, 2003

This article presents an overview of sociolinguistic research in the Dutch-speaking community of the Netherlands and Belgium. The overview is based on the contributions to the 4th Sociolinguistic Conference held in March 2003, after three earlier conferences in 1991, 1995 and 1999. Compared to the earlier conferences, the 2003 conference shows an increased number of papers, due to an increased involvement of Flemish researchers. In terms of sociolinguistic subdisciplines, the main developments are a decrease in the research of multilingualism and language contact, and a steady flow over the years of linguistic variation research, and of interaction and discourse studies. The most striking development, however, is the fact that almost half of the papers at the conference (49%) are concerned with aspects of Dutch and Belgian multicultural and multilingual society. Again 76% of this body of research is concerned with education. For this reason the authors survey the present-day relation between sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. They conclude that in the Dutch-speaking community and internationally, applied linguistics has developed into a field that encompasses sociolinguistics and presents a stage for the presentation of sociolinguistic research.

In sociolinguistics, a recurrent theme is the need not only to document threatened languages, but to ensure somehow that they will continue to be used. The basic trope is that of 'language death', analogous to the extinction of species. In fact, languages do not die but are abandoned by their users, usually for a more widely spoken language. In a basically sentimentalist view, linguistic diversity is believed to increase cultural diversity, while equal treatment of language groups is expected to mitigate inequality between and within these groups. This is not so. On the contrary, the promotion of minority, local and immigrant languages, all too often ill-equipped for contemporary usage, only serves to strengthen the position of the dominant language as the only common idiom: the more languages, the more English. This occurs in post-Apartheid South Africa as well as in the extending European Union.

In this article, the point of departure is the contradictor}' developments of increased multilingualism in society and, at the same time, the danger of the disappearance of some languages. The case of Friesland is used to illustrate these processes. I European efforts to safeguard and protect languages are briefly discussed, and the framework of the Kuromosaic study is mentioned. The language situation in Friesland has always involved more than just the bilingualism of Frisian and Dutch. The number of languages in daily life has increased over the last few years, but dialects such as Town-Frisian or the dialects on the Wadden-islands are spoken less well by the next generation. These processes can clearly be demonstrated by the local changes in the town of Hindeloopen and the provincial capital Leeuwarden. In Hindeloopen, proficiency in the local Frisian dialect has been halved in 50 years. In the capital, over 50 different languages are spoken at home nowadays. In the 'linguistic landscape' (the public display of languages) Frisian occupies a minor place. English and Dutch are prominent. It is concluded that these trends will continue, and some suggestions for further research into these new phenomena of multilingualism are given.

Historical sociolinguistic research on the Dutch language area during the 19th century has so far mainly been concerned with the situation in Flanders. Given the crucial relevance of this period for the history and the development of Dutch, however, there is a great need for comparable research clarifying the situation in the Northern part of the Dutch language territory. This article, which is explicitly intended as a 'teaser' for such research in the Netherlands, deals with the social communicative functions of dialect, Dutch and French for Flemish upper class writers from the town of Bruges in the 19th century. It will be demonstrated that the commonly accepted views of the opposition between French ([+prestige, upper class]) and Dutch ([-prestige, working class]) do not match the facts found in original archive corpora. Using town council records, meeting minutes from a prestigious upper class circle, and election propaganda, we will show that French, Dutch and dialect were used by the town elite according to stricdy pragmatic considerations to include or exclude specific segments of the town population in various communicative contexts.

The frequency and diversity of repeats in conversations between employees and clients of a social welfare office, suggest that repeats have an institutional function. This paper offers an analysis of the turn-initial repeat + contingent question in 34 conversations between employees and clients. This type of repeat occurs when an employee at the beginning of his/her turn literally repeats an item from the client's preceding turn and follows it up with a question. It is argued that in this procedure the repeat stabilkes an item from the client's turn as a topic that needs further elaboration. The contingent question specifies what aspect of this topic needs elaboration. This procedure allows the employee to collect the data that are needed to process the client's application.

In this investigation, we wanted to find out what the short-term and long-term effects are of explicit and implicit instruction on language learning with 11/12-year-old LI and L2 learners, characteristics, and whether those effects are different for lexical and syntactic language items. The main conclusions we can draw from this investigation are the following:11/12-year-old language learners appear to be capable of adequately acquiring explicit information about language in their language acquisition process. But there is the added condition that this explicit instruction should be imbedded in a communicative context. Also after one year, explicit instruction in a communicative context stul scores the best results, but the effect of explicit instruction only is significantly reduced in the long term.When we construct a combination of explicit and implicit instruction, it appears that explicit instruction foHowed by implicit instruction leads to better results than the reverse order; however, the combined input does not produce significantly better results than the teaching conditions with only explicit or only implicit instruction. The teaching effect for first language learners is generally a lot better than that for second language learners. Only for implicit instruction do first language learners proportionally score lower.Explicit instruction appears to be especially effective for introducing lexical languageitems. For syntactic language items, the results are much less outspoken.

Brussels is a bilingual citv, where Dutch has gradually gained high status, both economically and politically over the past decades. However, there are no bilingual educational programmes for French and Dutch, which is why many Francophone parents chose to send their children to the Dutch-medium schools of Brussels. These schools are one of the very few places where French-speaking and Dutch-speaking pupils get in touch with each other. The present contribution analyses to what extent the contact situation in these schools influences the language learning motivation of the secondary7 school pupils. Results of the motivational aspects to learn their mother tongue and the second language are compared with those of peers from control schools in Flanders and Wallonia. The main conclusion is that the contact situation positively influences the motivation to learn the second language and does not affect the motivation to learn the mother tongue.

In secondary education, mathematics education has been highly influenced by Realistic Mathematics, which means that mathematical problems are presented in rich linguistic contexts. In order to solve the mathematical problem, students have to make a correct representation of the problem, and this puts a great demand on a students' text comprehension abilities. Especially for those with low language abilities, this may cause problems.In this research, we want to explore the relationship between students' general academic text comprehension abilities and their ability to understand mathematical texts. The role of the different aspects of text comprehension in processing the text of mathematical problems will also be looked at. On the basis of previous research, we expect a great influence of academic text comprehension on the text comprehension of mathematical texts. We think that especially text comprehension abilities at the meso-level will be important in comprehending mathematics.We used five tests to determine the students' text comprehension abilities. We can conclude from our analyses that there is a significant relation between general academic text comprehension and text comprehension of mathematical texts. In addition, there is a significant relation between general academic text comprehension at the meso-level and text comprehension of mathematical texts. This finding matches our expectation that especially abilities at the meso-level of text comprehension play a role in text comprehension of mathematical texts.

A detailed examination of participants' everyday conversations in an online support group for people suffering from depression has shown that next to talking about their feelings of depression, participants display a pervasive concern with whether their request for support is appropriate. It was demonstrated how contrary to the assumptions that are often held with regard to communication via the Internet - portraying online communication being thought of as straightforward, free of obligations and ephemeral - participants employ a number of discursive procedures to account for their call for support. Participants may for example describe their request for support as a result of external emotions, present it in terms of honest feelings or explicitly and fiercely distance themselves from the part that voices these feelings. At the same time, talking about your feelings and asking for support is also presented as a moral obligation. The fragments presented thus show that what counts as an 'appropriate' request for support is a participants' concern and subject to continuous negotiation.

Children cannot mark well word boundaries in spoken language before they are about seven years of age, although some researchers (e.g., Karmiloff-Smith et al. 1996) claim a much earlier emergence. Different explanations have been put forward for the development of word marking skills: on the one hand developmental hypotheses which claim a primary role for language development or cognitive development, on the other hand the literacy hypothesis, which claims that systematic experience with written language is crucial for the development of formal metalinguistic skills, including the skill of marking words. The developmental hypothesis predicts age differences, i.e. between young children and adults, irrespective of literacy. The literacy hypothesis predicts differences between readers and non-readers, irrespective of age. Moreover, in the developmental hypotheses, it would not matter whether word boundaries were to be marked in a language with or without skill in the written language. The literacy hypothesis was tested twice in this contribution, first by comparing sentence segmentation skills of young children, adult illiterates and adult readers. It was tested again by comparing the segmentation skills of adult readers, whose mother tongue is only known in spoken form (speakers of Tarifit) with readers who know their mother tongue both in spoken and in written form. All comparisons confirmed the literacy hypothesis that knowledge of writing influences awareness of word boundaries in spoken form.

Over the last decade, the position of Moluccan pupils in the Dutch educational system has not improved. Undoubtedly, their Dutch language skills are a major factor in their chances of success. Yet Moluccan parents and Dutch teachers do not seem to be overly concerned about these language skills nor do they press for specific strategies in language teaching and language acquisition.This paper offers a summary of linguistic research on Moluccans in the last decade. Research has focused on several aspects, such as the vitality of Moluccan Malay as a minority language, the attitudes of parents towards bilingualism and bilingual education, the Dutch language skills of pupils in primáty and secondary education or the extent of literacy within the Moluccan community. The outcome should convince both parents and teachers that educational policies should include Moluccan pupils. The research provides some insights into the causes of the lack of progress. Still, until now, factors like the use of Dutch in Moluccan homes and local communities or the quality of interaction within the classroom have not been researched at all. Further research is needed to help improve the language policies of Dutch schools towards Moluccan pupils.

The Dutch discussion on immigrant minority language teaching, which has been going on for three decades now, shows a remarkable lack of conceptual clarity. This not only includes the content of the subject, but also its aims and its operationalisation in classroom practice. In creating this unclarity, not only the ministry of education and its advisors but also scholars and opinion leaders are involved, irrespective of their position against or in favour of this type of language teaching. This is shown on the basis of a reconstruction of the different versions of eigen taal (litt.: 'own language', i.e. the object of immigrant minority language teaching) in a number of central policy papers of the ministry of education, and on the basis of an analysis of the linguistic, pedagogic and public discourse that developed in this context. In order of appearance, three main versions of eigen taal are distinguished: offiaéle taal van het land van herkomst (official language of the country of origin), allochtone levende taal (non-indigenous living language) and gekomen taal (chosen language). The analysis shows that the recent 2002 decision of the Dutch government to do away with immigrant minority language teaching and give priority to the teaching of Dutch, should not be considered a surprise: without a fundamental change in societal power relationships, immigrant minority languages have little prospect of becoming a legitimate part of the dominant curriculum.