Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 78, Issue 1, 2007

This article examines how speakers of Lao (a Southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia) make references to persons in the course of everyday conversation. This seemingly simple referential problem turns out to be a rich locus of meaning in the domain of human social relations. In everyday person reference, the Lao system requires that speakers make fine distinctions in social hierarchy. Speakers must mark if a person is socially "lower" or "higher" than themselves. While to outsiders this may seem like a surface obsession with social hierarchy, it is virtually invisible to insiders, being the standard, normal way of talking. The paper argues, however, that while the meanings coded in ordinary behavior can become virtually invisible, speakers are nevertheless reproducing and making public the basic cultural perspective on human relations. The last part of the article explores this point with reference to English, in which person reference is highly "egalitarian", reflecting a cultural concern with "social equality".

While there is a long tradition of conducting research on medical communication, one may question in what way practicing physicians and courses for medical students will profit from it. The first part of our paper presents a short overview of 40 years of research, focusing on concepts of patient-centered care and shared decision-making. Pros and cons two co-existing traditions, process analysis and micro-analysis, are described. The second part of the paper presents the development of cognitive scripts in communication skills training in medical education. The differences between perspectives angles and educational perspectives are elaborated on. The third part of the paper describes the method and effects of the practical learning of new scripts for patient centeredness in the case of non-Western immigrant patients. Although education in communication skills definitely profits from research, daily practice seems to be much more complex, not in the least because of cultural differences.

News interviews play an important role in the way the formation of opinions. The details of this type of interaction have been studied quite recently by a number of scholars. In this study observational categories for evasive conversational behaviour, as proposed by these researchers, are applied to interviewees differing in gender and political activity. Its main question is: do interviewees of different gender and political commitment differ in their evasive reactions to questions? The data consist of 32 10-minute clips from interviews broadcast on Dutch TV or radio in 2003, 2004 and 2005. In the analysis, four different types of evasion were distinguished:1 Evasion by changing the discourse roles. Interviewees can avoid answering questions by adopting behaviour typical of the interviewer role, such as posing counter questions, listening actively instead of speaking, or changing the agenda of the interview.2 Evasion by playing with the rules for turn taking, for example, by interrupting the interviewer.3 Evasion by couching the answer in avoiding terms or by being polite and indirect.4 Evasion by questioning the question (its relevance, appropriateness or formulation), questioning a presupposition or giving a non-answer.Not surprisingly, the results show that politicians are more evasive than non-politicians. Less predictably, however, they also show that males are more evasive than females. The effect of gender is not as strong as that of political activity. When comparing male and female politicians, it turns out that both groups are often evasive, but make use of different means. Female non-politicians use evasions remarkably infrequently.

This article describes a method that aims to stimulate adolescents to become critically aware of the social practices accomplished through talk. A key feature of the method is that adolescents are invited to analyse their own conversation materials to accomplish this goal. We will explain how central concepts in the analytical framework employed in discursive psychology are translated into an approach consisting of five stages. Each stage is accompanied by a number of key questions, which constitute the method's backbone. We refer to this approach as the Discursive Action Method. We want to show how this method stimulates youngsters to critically reflect on everyday talk while maintaining a safe position (as 'distant observers'). We stress the importance of inviting youngsters to examine specific interactional features of their talk themselves, as an important 'active ingredient' of this method.

This article illuminates some of the discrepancies between the actual practice of police interrogations and the recommendations in police manuals. What appears to have a significant effect on the interrogations is the practice of typing the records while conducting the interrogation. The resulting question-answer-typing format favours some interrogation and recording techniques over others. Open questions may be good for eliciting the suspect's "own words", but they are difficult to combine with recording practices. Closed questions and summaries are easier to combine with recording practices, but they tend to result in the recording of the interrogator's words. These interrelations between the typing and the talk in the interrogations are overlooked in the manuals. An understanding of these interrelations can clarify the differences between the talk in the interrogations and the text of the police records.

This paper surveys recent research and scientific discussions about multilingualism in the Dutch asylum procedure. The paper focuses on the issue of language analysis in relation to questions of national origin in refugee cases. The Dutch institutional procedure is analyzed in order to assess in detail the communicative roles and interactions between the participants in this procedure (i.e. the asylum seeker, the official interviewee, the interpreter, the language analysts, the linguistic contra-experts and asylum lawyers). The main conclusion of the paper is that experts disagree on the reliability of the language analysis. International research is proposed to increase its quality. Moreover, the paper suggests that applied linguists should establish quality norms for the application of their research in legal contexts.

Kindergarten teachers who are talking with their nursery children during picture book reading about social and emotional themes, speak about the experiences and emotions of book characters, but also about the feelings of the children themselves. In both contexts the teachers tend to structure the interaction in a classical IRE frame, using highly projective elicitations as first pair parts and evaluations in the third sequential positions. This kind of elicitations and evaluations are not restrained to the knowledge domain, but are extended to the domains of children's experiences and feelings. The children prove to react very much according to the sequential projections of the teachers. So their answers do not so much reflect content learning as the learning of anaspect of the educational discourse, namely the participation framework that is expected in class.

This article describes an analysis of an interprofessional consultation between four university teachers, two of whom fulfill the role of educational advisor. They talk about the revision of their Biology courses. Many university teachers hardly ever talk about their teaching, and they do not very often get the opportunity to work on the development of their teaching abilities. In current approaches in faculty development, workplace-based, reflective dialogue is considered an effective method for the professional development of teachers. Interaction research and theorizing in this area are still rather poorly developed. The analysis of the Biology teachers' interactive thinking shows how the participants' concepts about course design develop in the course of the interaction. The interaction can be characterized as a complex, non linear, collaboration- and solution-oriented talk.

Learning is entering the discourse of a community of knowledgeable peers. However, in Dutch secondary education student discourse during autonomous working does not reflect the discourse of the community of the subject, but it reflects the discourse of the community of the school: the discourse of how to be a good student. Because both the teacher's verbal behavior and the formulation of the task strongly focus on procedural aspects like how to proceed in completing the task correctly, students mainly interact about the procedure of the task. They even perceive correct completion of higher importance than understanding the content of the task. And although students interact much more about the task during seatwork than both teachers and students had expected and they often know how to solve a task, they do not know why their answer is correct. Students are working very hard doing it wrong to do it right.

The present study explored the effect of reading texts in an electronic learning environment for 46 adult second language learners of Dutch with different proficiency levels. The reading materials were selected dynamically, based on the "fit" between the vocabulary proficiency of individual students and the relative difficulty of the texts. Text difficulty was determined on the basis of the relative proportion of words unknown to the learner (lemma coverage). The texts were analyzed, selected and presented online, accompanied by a personalized electronic dictionary with words that were assumed to be unknown to the reader. The vocabulary learned implicitly while reading was measured in a pretest - treatment - posttest design. The learners read three texts, with lemma coverages of 92%, 90% and 85%, respectively. The relation between dictionary use and word retention was also examined.The study revealed an average word-learning improvement of 32,5%, with no differences between texts with a 92%, 90% or 85% lemma coverage. With respect to dictionary use, the learners looked up an average of 8.0 words. Two-thirds of these words were known to them; they looked up only one-third of the unknown words. We found there was a relation between dictionary use and the retention of unknown words. We concluded that the method we propose for an automated adaptive selection of reading texts and individualized dictionaries ensures that learners of different proficiency levels receive linguistic input that is best suited to their abilities.

This paper examines whether the order in which Dutch emigrants in the English-speaking part of Canada lose their first language is the reverse of that in which Dutch-speaking children first acquire their mother tongue. This idea, captured in the regression hypothesis, has not been extensively tested so far. Through an experimental research design, the study shows that regression does obtain in the case of morphology, but that syntax is more dominated by second language influence from English. The results furthermore indicate that regression is a much more subtle phenomenon than has previously been assumed with attriters showing more parallels with advanced L1 acquirers than with children in the initial stages of their linguistic development.