Zoekresultaten

Helend schrijven

De flexibilisering van de arbeidsmarkt en de individualisering van de samenleving confronteren individuen met de eis om meer zelfsturend te worden. Zelfsturing is gebaseerd op het vermogen om aan zichzelf en aan anderen een verhaal te vertellen over de persoonlijke zin en de sociale betekenis van het eigen leven. Traditioneel was dit verhaal een afspiegeling van de verhalen die in de eigen familie werden verteld over hoe men een zin- en betekenisvol bestaan kon hebben. In onzekere omstandigheden hebben familieverhalen meestal echter maar een beperkte waarde. Veel mensen moeten daarom hun verhaal regelmatig updaten en soms zelfs een compleet nieuw verhaal ontwikkelen. Wij noemen dit identiteitsleren.

Cluttering identified: differential diagnostics between cluttering, stuttering and speech impairment related to learning difficulties

'Hakken en plakken'

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.

Investigating Dutch teachers’ beliefs on working with linguistic metaconcepts to improve students' L1 grammatical understanding

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.

How secondary school students may benefit from linguistic metaconcepts to reason about L1 grammatical problems

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.

When students tackle grammatical problems

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.