Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 71, Issue 1, 2004

In early Dutch learner varieties, there is no evidence of finiteness being a functional category. There is no V2nd: no correlation between inflectional morphology and movement. Initially, learners express the illocutive function of finiteness through the use of illocutive markers, with the non-use of an illocutive marker expressing the default illocutive function of assertion. Illocutive markers are functioning as adjuncts with scope over the predicate. Illocutive markers become re-analysed as functional elements.The driving force is the acquisition of the auxiliary verbs that occur with past participles. It leads to a reanalysis of illocutive markers as two separate elements: an auxiliary verb and a scope adverb. The (modal) auxiliary carries illocutive function. Lexical verb-argument structure (including the external argument) occurs within the domain of the auxiliary verb. The predicate as the focus constituent occurs within the domain of a scope adverb. This reanalysis establishes a position for the external argument within the domain of AUX. The acquisition of AUX causes the acquisition of a (hierarchical) structure with a complement as a constituent which represents an underlying verb-argument structure, a predicate as the domain of elements that are in focus, and an external (specifier) position as a landing site for elements with topic function.

"The world becomes more comprehensible to us when we are able to tell a coherent story about it" (Kintsch 1998, 18). The process of learning, from the language in books to the language in an exam, demands school-language proficiency. This research project tries to define what children at higher levels of secondary education (ţweede fase ('second phase)) should know about the Dutch language, and what skills they need to be successful at school. Furthermore, the question is which aspects of the so-called 'school-language proficiency' can be problematic in the learning process of the originally non-Dutch. A description of the literature on school-language proficiency is followed by interviews with three groups of experienced teachers (alpha, beta and gamma), who were asked which areas can cause problems for non-native students. Not (or not completely) knowing the meaning of (the application areas of) words can cause problems.Also the linguistically offered, sometimes strongly culturally bound, context information can distract students' attention from the scientific content they should focus on. Also other areas such as strategy, lack of contextual information, and monitor-behavior can cause problems. Furthermore, the impression arose that school-language proficiency is strongly linked to the specific knowledge of the subject in question, and that that knowledge is stored separately per subject in the students' brain. Insight into bigger relations comes at a later age, and only with that insight does the capacity to express these interrelations linguistically develop.

Content teachers play an important role in the realisation of content-based language instruction. This article addresses the question to what extent subject teachers stimulate the language acquisition of their students and what cognitions are crucial to their way of teaching. Views on the importance of comprehensible input, opportunities to use language productively, and providing feedback were part of the analyses. The research was set up as two separate case studies: an exploratory study in a multicultural economies class in vocational education, and an intervention study in mathematics in a multicultural primary school. Data on teachers' behaviour consisted of videotape lessons; data on teachers' cognitions were collected through stimulated recall interviews, concept maps, and semi-structured interviews. The results show that the teachers in both educational contexts realise comprehensible input to some degree, but do not create opportunities to use the language actively and do not give feedback on linguistic aspects of students' utterances. Interventions by the researcher-observer, however, promote change in both teaching practice and in the thinking of subject teachers towards a more language-sensitive approach.

The communicative movement in language instruction (from the seventies) pays special attention to language used in context. In connection to this, performance-based assessment became important. The communicative movement is seen in several models of language competence. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2001) is also aimed at functional language competence in context. It describes knowledge and skills that language learners have to develop. With the communicative movement and the CEF as background this article looks at two language-tests for L2-learners: the Swedish sfi-test and the Dutch NIVOR 3.4-test. Three areas of attention are looked at:1. The Swedish and Dutch language policies concerning immigrants.2. The theoretical backgrounds of the two tests and their connection to the CEF.3. The differences and similarities between the tests concerning test-assignments.It can be concluded that the Dutch language policy is stricter than the Swedish; that in both tests, functional language competence plays a big role, but that the Swedish test shows it more than the Dutch test.

Foreign languages can be employed in advertising to draw attention to the persuasive message. Such a foreign language may be effective because of the symbolic value that it represents, such as attractiveness or beauty. In that case, the comprehension of the foreign language is not important; it functions purely as a symbol. This study examined whether the appreciation of French slogans was affected by their comprehension. The participants (N=120) judged three slogans that were pretested as difficult to understand, and three slogans that were pretested as easy to comprehend. The slogans were presented in advertisements of six different cars of three different French car brands. The literal meaning of the slogans appeared to be important. The slogans that were well understood were more appreciated than those that were difficult to understand. At the same time, French proved to have a symbolic value: participants preferred the French slogan to the Dutch slogan if the slogan was understood. Future research could focus on the exact symbolic meaning of French in Dutch advertising.

This article deals with the linearization problem (Levélt, 1989). Alore specifically, it focuses on the position of temporal and causal expressions in Dutch complex sentences. As these expressions may occupy several positions in the independent clause, the question is: what position do they have in texts? Is there a dominant order, and if there is, how can we explain it? In the literature, three possible ordering constraints can be identified: frame structuring, isochrony, and thematic coherence. It is unclear how these principles interact. The present study will show that the interaction of the constraints can be explained partially by cognitive economy, which states that a language user prefers to minimalize his cognitive costs during language production. This can be seen both from the point of view of the producer and from the point of view of the interpreter.

This article examines first tendencies towards connective usage by French-speaking learners of Dutch. Two sorts of discursive markers were analyzed, viz., attitude and relational markers. The results show two main tendencies. On the one hand, the learners seem to overuse attitude markers. This has been explained by stating that it could be a sign of the difficulty they experienced in organizing texts, establishing coherence and introducing their opinion. This inclination has also been observed for the learner use of the causal connective dus ('so, therefore'). On the other hand, the investigation of the learner usage of backward causal connectives suggests that beginners use a reduced set of frequent connectives, while more experienced learners make use of a more varied set of connectives. The tendencies observed and hypotheses advanced will have to be quantitatively and qualitatively elaborated further in future research as well as expanded to other kinds of connectives.

The bilingual visual word-recognition experiment described in the article focused on the recognition of cognates, noncognates, and interlingual homographs in more and less proficient bilinguals and was designed to test the following hypotheses:1. There is a difference in reaction time to cognate, noncognate, and interlingual homograph words compared with control words.2. There is a difference in reaction time to cognate, noncognate and interlingual homograph words, compared with control words, between bilinguals with different levels of proficiency in their second language.Both proficiency levels recognized cognate words significantly faster than control words. Both novice and proficient bilinguals recognized noncognate words faster than control words. Low-proficiency bilinguals did not react faster to cognate words than to noncognate words, whereas the more proficient bilinguals did. This can be explained by a ceiling effect. Low-proficient bilinguals showed no effect in reaction time for interlingual homographs relative to the control words; the more proficient bilinguals showed an inhibitory effect. This could be because proficient bilinguals are more familiar with the less frequent (i.e., English) reading of the homograph.

Dyslexia is a language-development deficit in the area of reading and spelling. Research has provided evidence that the extent to which dyslexics have problems with literacy acquisition may differ across languages. It is thought that this is caused by differences in consistency concerning grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Consistencies and inconsistencies between languages may, therefore, also have an effect on L2 learning. If this is indeed the case, words that are orthographically and phonologically similar in both L1 and L2 will cause relatively few problems, while words that are only phonologically similar will cause greater inhibition effects for dyslexics compared to non-dyslexic readers. To test this hypothesis, I conducted a naming task with Dutch subjects who learned English at secondary school. The results show that dyslexic readers make more errors and have slower response times than non-dyslexic readers. I also compared two levels of proficiency (2 vmbo ('lower secondary professional education') and 5 vwo ('pre-university education'). In general, the dyslexies from vwo performed much better than dyslexies from vmbo, which was to be expected, as the students of vwo had had more experience in using the English language. The dyslexies in vwo did not, however, perform better compared to age-level controls than did the dyslexies in vmbo. Although more research is needed to determine what exactly the role of level of proficiency is in L2 acquisition, the results in general support the hypothesis that the inconsistencies in the English grapheme-phoneme correspondences provide an extra challenge for dyslexies who are learning English as a second language.

According to the distinctiveness hypothesis, words are best learned together if they are distinct; otherwise, cross-association may occur, i.e., words are confused. This means that clustering words thematically in instructed second-language acquisition is potentially disadvantageous for the speed with which the meaning is acquired. In this article, recent research is reviewed that supports the distinctiveness hypothesis. An experiment is presented in which first-year university students of Spanish learned 24 verbs, eight of which were semantically related (e.g., instar-'insist' on and preconizar-'argue'), eight were related in form (e.g., disponerse-'prepare oneself' and superponerse-'overlap'), and eight were unrelated (e.g., aplacar-'soothe' and acoger-'welcome'). The results support both hypotheses for the semantically related words, but not for the orthographically related words.

In SLA research, the study of prosody suffers from a considerable under-representation. Indeed, most work devoted to L2 pronunciation has hitherto focussed on 'lower level phenomena', such as the phonemes of the target language. This paper gives an overview of the research on the acquisition of a foreign accent system and pinpoints some research questions that have not been explored yet. More specifically, it discusses the phonetic, phonological and functional aspects of the accent system of second/foreign language learners. Attention is also paid to the studies dealing with the teaching of sentence stress to second/foreign language learners. Although more research is needed, this paper provides a better understanding of the way a new accent system is acquired/learnt and can be taught.