Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 84-85, Issue 1, 2010

As a result of European unification and a fast globalising world, classrooms have become increasingly multilingual and multicultural. This diversity may impair learning processes, since pupils acquire cognitively based literacy competencies, such 'classify and label', 'analyze and explain', by means of linguistic interaction. We asked primary and secondary school teachers to rate the level of their pupils' competencies, as well as their expected success rate. Our anticipation that teachers of a largely monocultural classroom (with predominately L1-Dutch pupils) would experience less problems with literacy competencies and expect a higher success rate compared to teachers of a multicultural classroom was supported.

This paper presents an explorative study on the reception of visual messages in the public space of a village community in the Gambia. For this study, images of billboards and other signs along the main road were shown to 20 villagers. They were asked what the images represented and how they knew this. It appeared that the interpretation of visual messages was based on more than the decoding of graphic symbols alone. Other semiotic signs play an important role as well. Twelve different types of interpretation were identified. It was concluded that a dichotomy of literate versus illiterate does not capture the complexity of the distribution of reading skills in the society.

This paper assesses the extent to which L2 learners' controlled productive collocational knowledge increases with proficiency level, and the extent to which controlled produc-tive collocational knowledge of L2 learners changes across word frequency levels. A proficiency test and a collocation test modelled after Laufer & Nation (1999) were administered to English majors at the University of Burundi. The results of the study suggest that controlled productive collocational knowledge develops alongside L2 proficiency without significant gains at low levels. This empirically supports Laufer's (1998) observation that productive vocabulary growth is slow in the first years and gains momentum later and strengthens the established relationship between productive collocation knowledge and L2 proficiency (Gitsaki, 1999; Bonk, 2001). Moreover, the study highlights the crucial role played by frequency in knowing words (cf. Nation & Beglar, 2007).

This paper aims to examine the existence of silence in language acquisition for learners in a multilingual environment using a survey conducted among the Dutch population in Sweden. The objective of the study was to investigate the extent to which children learning Dutch from their parents in a predominantly Swedish environment experience a silent period. The results show that a large proportion of the participants exhibit a silent period before the age of six. Furthermore, the most important influence on the children's acquisition of the minority language, Dutch, is the choice parents make with regard to the languages they use within the family, rather than any outside influences.

This article reports on a longitudinal study of the development of formulaic sequences in 22 teenage Dutch learners of English in high and low input conditions (Dutch bilingual TTO and Gymnasium). Written samples of language were collected monthly over a period of 3 years and analyzed using a holistic, integrated approach to the identification of formulaic sequences (chunks). Our results have revealed different developmental tendencies in our low and high input groups, even though both started off with no significant differences in the overall number of chunks (p>.05) and with a comparable proportion of different chunk types. While low input learners developed a limited range of mostly grammatically-based chunks, high input learners show increase in a wide range of chunks types. These are more lexical, idiomatic, longer and more complex in structure, which is reflected in numerous overlaps and nested sequences. High input learners also show considerable increase in chunks which can be used to construct longer and more complex sentences. However, although the contrast between the two groups in the increase of chunks is striking (p=.001), clear individual differences in developmental paths have been detected. These will be explored in further studies.

This article focuses on the emergence of relational coherence in linguistic expressions such as and, but, then, while, until, before. When do children start expressing relational coherence through various additive, temporal and causal connectives? Within a cognitive theory of coherence relations (Spooren & Sanders, 2008), it is on the basis of their increasing cognitive complexity that predictions are made about the order in which these coherence relations and their linguistic expressions are acquired. This means that causal connectives do not appear before additives, negative connectives not before positives, and temporal connectives occur after non-temporal ones.We investigated these claims in a longitudinal study on the development of story telling skills in 93 Dutch monolingual and bilingual children between the ages of 4 and 9. The results show a strong increase over time in the number and the diversity of connectives. We found evidence for all the hypotheses emerging from Spooren and Sanders' cognitive theory of coherence relations. We found that there are no significant differences between monolingual and bilingual children in their use of additive, temporal and causal connectives. Finally, it turned out that girls use significantly more additive, temporal and causal connectives than boys do at all periods in time.

The prevalence of dyslexia is 4-5% in the Netherlands. A well known instrument for measuring the risk for dyslexia is the Dyslexia Screening Test (DST). This study addresses cultural bias in the DST in a sample of 63 Dutch and 53 immigrant fifth-graders. A positive relationship between DST scores, word lexicon and socio-economic status was found. Although DST scores did not show group differences in risk indicators, a comparison of subtest scores showed that confounding cultural and linguistic influences complicated the identification of at risk children. Differences were only found in the subtests naming letters, naming pictures and verbal fluency. Probably, these differences are caused by bias, because of the specific cultural and linguistic character of these subtests. It was concluded that cultural bias (both construct and item bias) challenges the validity of the DST for assessment in multicultural groups.

Gathercole & Thomas (2009) concluded that Welsh children easily gained proficiency in the majority language (English) whereas the acquisition of the minority language (Welsh) lagged behind due to reduced input. Does this trend also occur in other minority language contexts, e.g. for Frisian in a context where Dutch is the majority language? In this longitudinal study, 98 toddlers were tested every six months for 1.5 years with respect to their receptive and productive vocabulary in Frisian and Dutch. Our research question was: what is the influence of the home language on the acquisition of Frisian and Dutch? Results from the first round of measurements indicate that an effect of the home language is present with respect to Frisian receptive and productive vocabulary and Dutch productive vocabulary. Interestingly, no effect of the home language is found on Dutch receptive vocabulary: for Dutch receptive vocabulary, it does not seem to matter whether a child has Frisian or Dutch as their home language.

It has often been argued that the teaching of L2 articulatory settings (AS) will improve learners' L2 pronunciation. However, although many impressionistic accounts have been written on the subject, only few empirical studies have been conducted to test these assumptions. This article reports on a study set out to test the effectiveness of teaching AS differences to Dutch secondary school pupils in order to improve their pronunciation of English. Four AS lessons were given to a group of secondary school pupils, while a control group received standard pronunciation lessons concentrating on segmental differences. The pupils were recorded while doing a picture description task both before and after instruction. Native speaker judges then assessed their English pronunciation proficiency. Although no significant differences were found between pre and post instruction pronunciation proficiency in both groups as a whole, there were a number of pupils in both groups that did improve their pronunciation. These results might be explained by Dynamic Systems Theory.

The connectives daardoor (as a result) and dus (so) can both mark forward causality in Dutch. However, they differ in specificity and subjectivity. Daardoor gives the reader a very specific instruction, since it can only mark objective cause/effect relations. Dus can not only mark subjective argument/claim relations, but also summaries and paraphrases. The specificity hypothesis predicts that relations marked with specific connectives will be processed faster than relations marked with less specific connectives. The subjectivity hypothesis predicts that subjective relations will be processed slower than objective relations, but that this difference will disappear when the subjectivity is marked in advance. Results of an eye tracking experiment were in line with the specificity hypothesis: reading times were longer for dus than for daardoor, even when the subjectivity was marked in advance. The results give an insight in how the characteristics of connectives affect discourse processing.

Recent research has shown that an important characteristic of English science writing is the use of inanimate subjects with agentive verbs (IS-AV constructions), as in this paper suggests or this theory argues. This article explores the use of such IS-AV constructions from a cross-linguistic perspective, investigating, by means of two small-scale corpus studies, whether they are used differently in English and Dutch academic prose and how they are translated in English-Dutch translations in this genre. The results are relevant for Dutch writers of English academic texts and translators working with these languages, and raise a number of broader theoretical issues with respect to contrastive differences between English and Dutch, the possibility of English influence on Dutch academic prose, and the desirability of IS-AV constructions in this genre.

This paper investigates how dyads of test subjects establish shared orientation and signal understanding using deictic gestures in task-based discourse. My findings show that participants co-construct routes using collaborative pointing, which is often accompanied by overlap in speech. The data also reveal that one participant sometimes acts as the sole speaker while the other one adopts the speaker's orientation. My data suggest that listeners then establish a shared orientation by an embodiment of the speaker's gesture (cf. McNeill, 2008; 2010). Verbally, this ratification is carried out either by overlap or by repetition of directions and route plannings. My research highlights the special nature of deictic gestures in discourse based on an explicit task, as opposed to, for example, narrative production, and reveals strategies that co-participants apply to ratify agreement.

In this paper we will show how different types of after-school day care (bso) influences discourse between caretakers and children. In field research carried out in the context of a PhD-study on the social development and discourse practices of young children in after-school day care, a continuum was found ranging from traditional bso's on the one hand to child-centered bso's on the other hand. In the more traditionally oriented bso's caretakers mainly take care of the children and try to instill proper behaviour in them. In the more child-centered bso's caretakers help children to discover the world by themselves. In this type of bso children learn to use exploratory talk in discourse with caretakers. In a first study of conflicts between peers it was observed that different arguments are being used by the peers.

Since concepts can be regarded as associative links to lexical items, conceptual representations can be measured verbally by looking at word associations. Word associations from native speakers of Dutch and from native speakers of English were used to form two priming conditions for an associative-priming study with a lexical-decision task. Participants were a low-proficiency group of Dutch students of English, a high-proficiency group of Dutch students of English and a group of native speakers of English. Results showed variation between different (groups of) items, suggesting that highly proficient students of English perform native-like on items which have different connotations in Dutch and English, and that native speakers of English show inhibitory responses on items with backward associative strength, whereas both Dutch groups did not show this inhibition.

While for a long time words and grammatical rules were regarded as the basic units in language, it has become increasingly clear that we have a much more varied set of units at our disposal, including multiword chunks. How such chunks are represented, which factors contribute to their entrenchment as units and to what extent this differs from person to person are questions that require investigation.In this paper we report on the results of a magnitude estimation task investigating variation in entrenchment, both between units and across individuals. Interesting discrepancies were found between corpus frequencies and the participants' assessments of unit status, as well as substantial differences between individuals. These results are important with respect to usage-based theories of language, as they contribute to a more precise account of basic assumptions regarding the relative importance of the factor frequency in shaping linguistic representations and in giving rise to variation across speakers.