Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 74, Issue 1, 2005

Children develop their language proficiency through language acquisition oriented conversations with adult speakers. A conversation is acquisition-oriented when there is an adequate balance between the adult's input and feedback on the one hand and the child's production on the other hand. Educational settings happen to lack opportunities for production. However, as children need to participate in acquisition-oriented conversations, teachers will need to acquire interactional skills for creating those conversations and teacher counselors and teacher educators need to support teachers in acquiring these interactional skills. This is how we have defined the ecosystem. All of the elements discussed above are addressed in this paper. In cooperation with practitioners, we have developed teacher materials and training materials, and we have conducted a process evaluation. Based on this evaluation the teacher training was improved and training for teacher counselors and educators was developed. In a follow up study, conversations of the trainees will be analysed: did they improve their interactional behavior and create more opportunities for language acquisition? We hope to report on these results at a later occasion.

Over the last years public attention has focused more and more on preschool playgroups as a means of improving ethnic minority' children's chances for later school success. With regard to literacy development, one of the pillars of the school curriculum, ethnic minority children often appear to lag behind on comprehension literacy skills, rather than on technical literacy skills. Smith & Dickinson (1994) showed that the improvement of comprehension skills is possible in preschool education, provided they are accompanied by cognitively challenging interactions. It can be expected, however, that children whose home language is not the (pre)school language have difficulties participating in such interactions. The two studies presented in this paper seem to confirm this line of thought. The results of Study 1, a quantitative investigation into the relation between preschool playgroup participation and later school success, showed no significant differences on literacy tests in kindergarten, grades 1 and 2, between ethnic minority children who had and had not visited preschool playgroups. Study 2, a multiple case-study of three Turkish boys in a Dutch preschool playgroup, showed that Mehmet, Batuhan, and Yunus were only able to engage in cognitively challenging interactions after more than a year of preschool participation.

The present article discusses the importance of deep word knowledge and reports on an empirical study on the effects of a new didactical approach in vocabulary teaching in kindergarten. All children need to learn a large number of words for adequate communication and learning at school. It is well known that there are huge differences between monolingual and bilingual children: not only in the number of words they know, but also in the depth of word knowledge. These differences have a profound effect on children's academic performances. Programs have been developed to enhance learning and vocabulary acquisition with young children, but the results in the word knowledge domain are not sufficient. The approach proposed in this article aims not only at learning more words , but also at improving the deep word knowledge. In this approach specific attention is given to concept building and the enlightening of lexical meaning relations (especially hierarchical relations, which are important in academic learning). Evaluation of the effects of this method shows that in a short period children not only learn significantly more words, but also acquire a deeper knowledge of the lexical meanings and meaning-relations between words. Both breadth and depth of vocabulary acquisition can thus be improved.

In this article various aspects of word knowledge and their relations to the text comprehension skills have been investigated for 197 monolingual and bilingual children in grade 5. All children performed three different vocabulary tasks, measuring breadth (quantitative knowledge: 'how many words do they know?'), depth (qualitative knowledge: 'how well do they know (paradigmatic and decontextualized, syntagmatic) relationships between words?'), and words used in school texts (scientific jargon: 'do they know the science-specific meaning of words?'). Besides this, a text comprehension task was administered investigate the relative importance of these different aspects of word knowledge to text comprehension. The analyses showed that bilingual children performed significantly lower on all tasks as compared to their monolingual peers. The highest differences were found on breadth of vocabulary, the lowest on the depth task. Besides this, the breadth task showed the highest correlations with text comprehension, and the depth task the lowest. These conclusions hold for both monolinguals and bilinguals. Finally, a (stepwise) multiple regression analysis revealed that the breadth task explained 38% of the variance of the scores on the text comprehension task. The depth task adjusts to that only 2%. Analyses for monolingual and bilingual children separately yielded comparable outcomes. From this, we conclude that for both monolingual and bilingual children text comprehension is determined by breadth of vocabulary.

In this paper, we investigate the development of dislocation structures in three French-Dutch bilingual children. Dislocations are a syntactic means of marking the element that is the topic of an utterance. As such, they constitute the interface between syntax and pragmatics, a domain that has been claimed to be vulnerable and open to cross-linguistic influence. The model of cross-linguistic influence developed by Hulk & Mueller (2000) and tested by us for dislocations in a French-Dutch context, would predict an overuse of right dislocations in the Dutch of bilingual children. This prediction was not borne out in our investigation. We suggest two explanations for this fact. First, we found that French and Dutch child directed speech contains more right dislocations than French and Dutch adult-to-adult speech. Second, Dutch monolingual children produce much more right dislocations than Dutch adults do. We suggest that both monolingual and bilingual children have a strong preference to mark the topic element in an utterance in a non-ambiguous way and that they therefore use a large quantity of right dislocations. This effect may mask possible cross-linguistic influences for this domain.

In multilingual advertising, a foreign language is often used for symbolic purposes. Symbolic associations carried by the foreign language are assumed to transfer to the product advertised. Although a number of suggestions have been made as to the associations generated by foreign language use, it has never been tested what associations are actually evoked in the minds of the consumers, and whether these association are only positive. In an experimental study, 78 Dutch respondents were asked to write down their associations with advertisements for one product which were identical except for the foreign language in which they were written (French, German, or Spanish). Some associations were shared by the three languages, but there were also large differences in the kinds of associations. Half of the associations with French and Spanish were positive. With German, only a third of the associations were positive and a relatively high number of negative associations were found.

The use of English in advertising aimed at non-native speakers of English is claimed to enhance image and text evaluation and to have no negative impact on comprehension. We tested these claims using promotional websites aimed at Dutch youngsters. Dutch secondary school pupils evaluated a completely English and a partly English homepage and completely Dutch versions of these homepages. Each participant evaluated a version with English of one homepage and a completely Dutch version of the other homepage. No significant differences were found between the Dutch and English versions of the homepages regarding image of the product advertised, evaluation of the website, and intention to use the product. The Dutch version either scored better than the English version on text evaluation, or the differences between the versions were not significant. Respondents were better at describing the meaning of Dutch terms than of their English equivalents.

In Brussels, multilingualism is considered an important asset. Especially knowledge of French, Dutch (Belgium's two main national languages) and English is a pre-requisite for good career opportunities. In this context, students' attitudes towards languages and language learning are of interest to both language teachers and educational policy makers, especially since these attitudes are assumed to have an (indirect) influence on the success rate of second and foreign language acquisition (Ellis, 1994; Gardner, 1985; MacIntyre, 2002; Dörnyei, 2003). The purpose of our study was to investigate the relationship between language images, attitudes and language learning motivation in a multilingual environment. The findings indicate that learner characteristics such as linguistic background and contact with the target language are variables modifying this relationship.

The multilingual society is a fact, both in Belgium and in the Netherlands. Minority languages like Arab, Turkish or Hindi have a strong position, even though they are not officially supported. English and the major European languages, on the other hand, have a protected status in education. The European modern languages are being promoted by the official European language policy. The minority languages, however, do not have an official status in education in Flanders and the Netherlands. The academic world asks for more official recognition of the minority languages and resists the idea that all efforts should go into majority standard language education. The official policy, on the other hand, gives absolute priority to the learning of the majority Dutch standard language, as a means to integration of minority groups. Officially, multilingualism is fostered only in so far as the modern European languages are concerned. In Belgium the multilingual language policy is hampered by the existence of a series of language laws that complicate multilingual education.

After briefly situating the state of indigenous language minorities within the present European Union, this article investigates the role of minority language education in language maintenance efforts in present-day Hungary. A sketch of Hungary's contemporary policy on minority education is followed by a description of the daily praxis in minority education. The confrontation of policy and praxis leads to a critical evaluation that mainly focuses on structural shortcomings. To conclude, some statements are formulated on further requirements of sociolinguistic and contact linguistic research in the multilingual Hungarian setting.

Within the context of school success of ethnic minority children in the Netherlands, it is currently debated what criteria should be applied by the Ministery of Education in assigning extra funds to children at risk. To this date, two criteria are used: level of parental education and parents' country of origin. As both criteria do no longer fully comply with the needs, it is proposed to test the children entering Kindergarten, with respect to their language proficiency in Dutch and/or their intelligence. This article reports the results of a longitudinal study on the language and school development of monolingual Dutch and bilingual ethnic minority children who were followed from entering Kindergarten at the age of 4, to the end of grade 6 in primaty school at the age of 12. During the first four years, Dutch language tasks ( ) were annually administered. Besides, children took an intelligence test (RAKIT) at the age of five. In grade 6, at the age of 12, a test battery of Dutch language proficiency, writing, reading, mathematics, science and information processing tasks were administered (Cito Eindtoets) to operationalise 'school success'. Finally, several background data were gathered, such as level of parental education and home language use. The results of regression analyses tentatively show that a language test administered in Kindergarten is the best predictor of school success (Multiple R= .432), that the intelligence test adjusts 4% to that, and that both home language use and parental education add another 2%. For the ethnic minority children alone, the Dutch language test (R2=.275) and home language use (adding 5%) are the only two predicting factors. However, if we look into the data as if we were teachers and had to decide whether or not to assign extra funds to a specific child on the basis of his/her test scores in Kindergarten, 29% of those assignments had been wrong: 14% wrongly not assigned ('false negatives'), and 15% wrongly assigned ('false positives'). For only 11% of the children the assignment of funds would have been predicted correctly. From this perspective, testing children in Kindergarten is not the most appropriate way to assign extra funds to children at risk.

Previous research has shown that the Dutch 'Final Test of Primary Education' contains a number of unintentionally and therefore unwanted, difficult test items, leading to Differential Item Functioning (DIF) for immigrant minority students whose parents' dominant language is Turkish or Arab/Berber. Two statistical procedures were used to identify DIF-items in the Final Test of 1997. Subsequently, five experiments were conducted to detect causes of DIF, revealing a number of hypotheses concerning possible linguistic, cultural, and textual sources. These hypotheses were used to manipulate original DIF-items into intentionally DIF-free items. The article discusses three possible sources of DIF: (1) the use of fixed (misleading) answer-options and (2) of misleading illustrations (both in the disadvantage of the minority students), and (3) the fact that questions concerning past tense often lead to DIF (in their advantage).

Possessive constructions in French, Italian and Dutch are similar. Acquisition of these constructions therefore largely follows the same course. The differences between the languages lead to some cross-linguistic phenomena in bilingual first language acquisition. To a large extent, the stages in the acquisition can be explained by the Structure Building Hypothesis. This theory claims that the acquisition of a construction follows the structural expansion of the child's grammar. However, the data shows much variability in the children's' utterances, which does not seem to fit this framework. Part of the variability may be explained by hypothesizing an intermediate stage in which the children experiment with the morphological elaboration of the DP. However, the co-occurrence of utterances from clearly different stages in the acquisition for a long period cannot be explained in this way. A possible solution would be to assume that this type of variation is the outcome of co-existing parallel grammars, which continue to be activated until the child chooses definitely for the standard adult system. Further research is needed to find firm corroboration of this hypothesis.

The acquisition of fmiteness, more particularly the morphological marking of finiteness is a well-known obstacle in L2 acquisition by adult learners. This paper deals with an interlanguage stage in the acquisition of Dutch by Turkish and Moroccan learners producing a remarkable pattern that occurs neither in the target language, nor in the learners' native language. These learners use lexical markers (free morphemes) as precursors of fully inflected thematic verbs. In this pattern, the lexical marker is (copula 3SG) is linked either to an infinitival, an inflected form, or to a second, identical form is. This pattern is considered from different perspectives: functional-semantic, syntactic, and developmental. It is argued that this lexical marker is deprived of meaning and that its function is primarily syntactic. The inference is that syntax precedes morphology, especially free morphology in adult L2 acquisition.

The need for unbiased methods of assessing children's development is an ongoing concern. Inspired by the psychometric tradition of intellectual assessment, traditional norm-referenced language tests rely heavily on children's previous experience, or 'world knowledge'. When test takers differ in their exposure to concepts, words and activities, as is often the case with children from different ethnic, cultural, or economic backgrounds, any assessment tool that taps the child's existing store of knowledge runs the risk of confusing 'difference' with 'disorder'. In recent years, a number of alternative assessment procedures have been developed that reduce some of the biases inherent in norm-referenced standardized tests. This article discusses some problems and recent solutions to the use of norm-referenced testing, with a focus on processing dependent procedures such as non-word repetition.

In the officially bilingual Belgian capital Brussels, two independent education systems operate in parallel: a Dutch-language education system and a French-language education system. Pupils and parents can choose between both systems freely and independently of their home language background. Many Francophone parents prefer to enrol their children in Dutch-language schools in Brussels, because they believe this will stimulate their bilingual development. As a consequence of the massive inflow of French-speaking pupils in Dutch-language education in Brussels, an atypical form of education has emerged which we call "immersion-like education". In a previous cross-sectional study, the language skills of predominantly Dutch-speaking and predominantly French-speaking were tested. In this paper we will discuss the longitudinal development of Dutch L2 productive skills of native speakers of French across three consecutive school years. To assess their writing and speaking skills in their L2, predominantly French-speaking pupils were asked to write an informal letter to a friend, to write down arguments for and against a statement and to retell a wordless picture story. Based on these productions, three parameters were calculated: accuracy, complexity and fluency. In this paper, we describe the development of these parameters by means of repeated measures analyses of variance. We also discuss whether or not there is any relationship between these parameters. We ultimately address the question if this form of immersion-like education actually stimulates the development of bilingualism.

Turkish spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) is described as "idiosyncratic", "different" or simply "wrong" by monolingual Turkish speakers in Turkey (TR-Turkish). It is a well-known fact that languages in contact affect each other in various ways (Thomason, 2001). As a result of contact, changes may occur in the linguistic systems of the contact languages. According to Owens (1996), these changes start with the borrowing of multi word unit (construction) structures from the contact language or languages. Based on this observation, this study explores the question if the borrowed structures of Dutch constructions cause NL-Turkish to be identified as unconventional by TR-Turkish speakers. As a case study, unconventional non-finite constructions are analyzed. The results of the analyses reveal structural copying of Dutch constructions in several ways, which causes unconventionality in NL-Turkish.

This article examines the foundations of language attrition research. As such, it argues that all attrition research should essentially build on four pillars: international contacts, theoretical perspectives, methodological perspectives and social relevance. The four pillars are discussed individually in relation to past research, but also with regard to current attempts to strengthen these four modules. It is argued that only further efforts on all these four fronts can achieve a cohesive research field and can lead to insights into the actual processes underlying attrition.