Teacher beliefs have been shown to play a major role in shaping educational practice, especially in the area of grammar teaching―an area of language education that teachers have particularly strong views on. Traditional grammar education is regularly criticized for its focus on rules-of-thumb rather than on insights from modern linguistics, and for its focus on lower order thinking. A growing body of literature on grammar teaching promotes the opposite, arguing for more linguistic conceptual knowledge and reflective or higher order thinking in grammar pedagogy. In the Netherlands, this discussion plays an important role in the national development of a new curriculum. This study explores current Dutch teachers’ beliefs on the use of modern linguistic concepts and reflective judgment in grammar teaching. To this end, we conducted a questionnaire among 110 Dutch language teachers from secondary education and analyzed contemporary school textbooks likely to reflect existing teachers’ beliefs. Results indicate that teachers generally appear to favor stimulating reflective judgement in grammar teaching, although implementing activities aimed at fostering reflective thinking seems to be difficult for two reasons: (1) existing textbooks fail to implement sufficient concepts from modern linguistics, nor do they stimulate reflective thinking; (2) teachers lack sufficient conceptual knowledge from linguistics necessary to adequately address reflective thinking.
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When teaching grammar, one of the biggest challenges teachers face is how to make their students achieve conceptual understanding. Some scholars have argued that metaconcepts from theoretical linguistics should be used to pedagogically and conceptually enrich traditional L1 grammar teaching, generating more opportunities for conceptual understanding. However, no empirical evidence exists to support this theoretical position. The current study is the first to explore the role of linguistic metaconcepts in the grammatical reasoning of university students of Dutch Language and Literature. Its goal was to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of students’ grammatical conceptual knowledge and reasoning and to investigate whether students’ reasoning benefits from an intervention that related linguistic metaconcepts to concepts from traditional grammar. Results indicate, among other things, that using explicit linguistic metaconcepts and explicit concepts from traditional grammar is a powerful contributor to the quality of students’ grammatical reasoning. Moreover, the intervention significantly improved students’ use of linguistic metaconcepts.
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In L1 grammar teaching, teachers often struggle with the students’ conceptual understanding of the subject matter. Frequently, students do not acquire an in-depth understanding of grammar, and they seem generally incapable of reasoning about grammatical problems. Some scholars have argued that an in-depth understanding of grammar requires making connections between concepts from traditional grammar and underlying metaconcepts from linguistic theory. In the current study, we evaluate an intervention aiming to do this, following up on a previous study that found a significant effect for such an approach in university students of Dutch Language and Literature (d = 0.62). In the current study, 119 Dutch secondary school students’ grammatical reasonings (N=684) were evaluated by language teachers, teacher educators and linguists pre and post intervention using comparative judgement. Results indicate that the intervention significantly boosted the students’ ability to reason grammatically (d = 0.46), and that many students can reason based on linguistic metaconcepts. The study also shows that reasoning based on explicit underlying linguistic metaconcepts and on explicit concepts from traditional grammar is more favored by teachers and (educational) linguists than reasoning without explicit (meta)concepts. However, some students show signs of incomplete acquisition of the metaconcepts. The paper discusses explanations for this incomplete acquisition.
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L1 grammar teaching worldwide often takes the form of traditional grammar teaching with decontextualized parsing exercises and rules of thumb. Some researchers have proposed enriching such forms of grammar teaching by relating traditional grammatical concepts to underlying metaconcepts from linguistic theory. The merits of such an approach have become apparent in recent intervention studies, but the question remains how teachers perceive such forms of grammar teaching, which is of particular importance for curriculum development. The present study investigated Dutch teachers’ beliefs in focus groups and a national survey (N = 127). It is found that Dutch language teachers see important benefits of a metaconceptual approach to grammar teaching, particularly as a means to improve students’ grammatical understanding. However, results also indicate that while teachers may see clear pedagogical and conceptual advantages of working based on underlying metaconcepts, their own teaching practice appears to be much more traditional. This discrepancy is explained by assuming that contextual factors have a restraining effect on what teachers can or want to do in reality. Once such contextual factors no longer play a part, teachers’ views tend to be much more geared towards a metaconceptual approach. The paper concludes with some implications for future research.
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The sharing economy holds promise for the way we consume, work, and interact. However, consuming in the sharing economy is not without risk, as institutional trust measures (e.g. contracts, regulations, guarantees) are often absent. Trust between sellers and buyers is therefore crucial to complete transactions successfully. From a buyer ́s perspective, a seller ́s profile is an important source of information for judging trustworthiness, because it contains multiple trust cues such as a reputation score, a profile picture, and a textual self-description. The effect of a seller’s self-description on perceived trustworthiness is still poorly understood. We examine how the linguistic features of a seller’s self-description predict perceived trustworthiness. To determine the perceived trustworthiness of 259 profiles, 189 real buyers on a Dutch sharing platform rated their trustworthiness. The results show that profiles were perceived as more trustworthy if they contained more words (which could be an indicator of uncertainty reduction), more words related to cooking (indicator of expertise), and more words related to positive emotions (indicator of enthusiasm). Also, a profile’s perceived trustworthiness score correlated positively with the seller’s actual sales performance. These findings indicate that a seller’s self-description is a relevant signal to buyers, eventhough it is cheap talk (i.e. easy to produce). The results can guide sellers on how to self-present themselves on sharing platforms and inform platform owners on how to design their platform so that it enhances trust between platform users.
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Orthography is considered to be a major problem in Dutch education, since many pupils don’t seem to be able to master orthographic rules, even after years of education. In educational literature it is argued that the problems related to spelling are caused by approaches that focus more on rules of thumb than on linguistic insights. This is somewhat remarkable, since a good understanding of the Dutch orthographic system requires a fair amount of morphological knowledge. In order to effectively implement this knowledge, the development of a morphological awareness (MA) seems to be required. Therefore, a short intervention was designed for the upper levels of secondary schools (4 havo) which aimed to foster MA and, subsequently, improve orthographic skills. Results of this quasi-experimental study indicate that a short intervention can significantly boost MA, but that students don’t seem to be able to use MA effectively to enhance spelling performance.
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I wanted to know why this development of communication in English with Germans was taking place and if this was only a development particular to the Netherlands, or Limburg, or were other cultures also experiencing the same. However, yearning to know the answer is one thing, but having the opportunity to study this phenomenon is another.
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Objectives: The aim of this scoping review was threefold: 1. to identify existing definitions of oral frailty and similar terms in gerodontology literature; 2. to assess the oral frailty definitions and analyze whether these are well formulated on a conceptual level; and 3. in the absence of existing definitions meeting the criteria for good conceptual definitions, a new conceptual definition of oral frailty will be presented. Methods: A search was performed in electronic databases and internet search engines. Studies explaining or defining oral frailty or similar terms were of interest. A software-aided procedure was performed to screen titles and abstracts and identify definitions of oral frailty and similar terms. We used a guide to assess the quality of the oral frailty definitions on methodological, linguistic, and content-related criteria. Results: Of the 1,528 screened articles, 47 full-texts were reviewed. Thirteen of these contained seven definitions of oral frailty and ten definitions of similar terms. We found that all definitions of oral frailty contain the same or equivalent characteristics used to define the concepts of ’oral health’, ’deterioration of oral function’, and ’oral hypofunction’. Between the seven definitions, oral frailty is described with a different number and combination of characteristics, resulting in a lack of conceptual consistency. None of the definitions of oral frailty met all criteria. Conclusion: According to our analysis, the current definitions of oral frailty cannot be considered ’good’ conceptual definitions. Therefore, we proposed a new conceptual definition: Oral frailty is the age-related functional decline of orofacial structures.
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The presentation of management information on screens and paper is aimed at the initiation of control actions in order to bring about predefinied goals. The terms and concepts used in this control information can be interptreted in different ways. It is of vital importance that adequate definitions for these terms and concepts are provided, because of the area of tension betrween those that control and those being controlled. The creation of a common conceptual framework and the maintenance of concepts and definitions can be supported by the construction of an organization-specific lexicon and the use of modern IT tools.
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This paper reports on CATS (2006-2007), a project initiated by the Research Centre Teaching in Multicultural Schools, that addresses language related dropout problems of both native and non-native speakers of Dutch in higher education. The projects main objective is to develop a model for the redesign of the curriculum so as to optimize the development of academic and professional language skills. Key pedagogic strategies are the raising of awareness of personal proficiency levels through diagnostic testing, definition of linguistic demands of curriculum tasks, empowerment of student autonomy and peer feedback procedures. More specifically, this paper deals with two key areas of the project. First, it describes the design and development of web-based corpus software tools, aimed at the enhancement of the autonomy of students academic reading and writing skills. Secondly, it describes the design of three pilots, in which the process of a content and language integrated approach - facilitated by the developed web tools - was applied, and these pilots respective evaluations. The paper concludes with a reflection on the project development and the experiences with the pilot implementations.
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