Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 38, Issue 3, 2016

The potential impact of informal computer-mediated communication on the spelling performance of Flemish adolescents in school contexts

In recent decades, all kinds of media have been echoing the concerns of parents and teachers who fear that online chat practices corrupt the writing and especially the spelling skills of youngsters. The main objective of the present study was to assess the potential impact of the informal online writing practices of adolescents on their formal offline spelling performance at school. 2584 school tasks, tests and exams by Flemish secondary school students were analysed for spelling mistakes. 6306 word forms with deviations from the Dutch spelling norms were primarily classified as either classic spelling mistakes versus instances of chat language interference. The dominant findings relate to the minimal proportion of direct interference from informal chat practices. Students generally do not integrate chat conventions into their school tasks. However, the educational track appears to be a determining variable: students with a vocational training seem to have more trouble to distinguish informal online from formal offline writing repertoires than students in a technical or general secundary school programme. Finally, the correlation between students’ production of classic spelling mistakes and chat language interferences appears to be weak, which suggests that these two types of deviations from the norm spelling might have different grounds.

Argumentative vocabulary in Dutch national examinations of reading proficiency. Recent revisions

For years, in Dutch general secondary education (havo and vwo) argumentation skills are part of the national examinations in reading proficiency. Recently, the Dutch Board of Examinations (College voor Toetsen en Examens – CvTE) asked an advisory committee to evaluate the argumentative vocabulary used in the yearly exams in relation to the current state of the art in argumentation research. The committee advised a light revision of the specification of educational goals and formulated a list of argumentational concepts and definitions that can be used in the national examinations. In this article the authors – committee members – account for the proposals of the committee. The room for change was defined by the examination programme of the Dutch minister of education and by the executive role of the CvTE. Moreover, the state of the art in argumentation research had to be set alongside the usability of concepts in educational practice and effective testing of reading skills.

Using T-Scan to analyse the lexical complexity of text genres

T-Scan is a tool for the automatic analysis of Dutch text. This paper presents the first large-scale corpus analysis with T-Scan, focusing on lexical complexity. A collection of nearly 1000 text specimens was assembled, containing ten genres: travel blogs, celebrity news features, novels, textbooks for vocational secondary schools, textbooks for general secondary schools, news reports, opinion pieces, political programs, medical advice texts and research articles. The lexical complexity features in the analysis include morphology, word frequency, various word concreteness indices, personal pronouns, names and verb tense. Systematic genre differences are found, such that a genre detection model comprising 18 T-Scan features correctly identifies 83 percent of the corpus texts. Most lexical features differentiating genres intuitively relate to text topic complexity. A closer analysis is offered of the contrast between the two textbook samples in the corpus, which differ only in the educational levels they cater for. Again, topic variation seems a more important factor than stylistic variation. We demonstrate a new method to examine stylistic variation, which consists of within-genre comparisons using the genre prediction; more specifically, ‘deviant’ texts are compared to ‘typical’ members of their genre.

Stylistic elements in children’s writings from grades 3 to 6

In this article, the use of stylistic elements in children’s writings is investigated, and how this use develops in the course of elementary school. We looked at stories written by 200 children from grades 3 to 6 (ages 9 to 12) of elementary school. We focused on two categories of stylistic elements: at the level of the organization of the story (e.g., the use of narrative framing, narrators’ perspective, reported speech, word repetition, and moral) and at the level of elaborate wordings to enliven the story (e.g., the use of detailed wordings, intensifiers, and ‘surprising phrases’). We related these to the children’s scores on vocabulary, reading and writing cohesion tasks. The results showed that as the stories became longer and exhibited more lexical variance, there was a significant growth from grade 3 to grade 6 in the number of elaborated wordings children used. No differences between girls and boys were found, but Dutch L1 outperformed Dutch L2 children in almost all these stylistic elements. However, with respect to stylistic organization, there were no differences between the grades, and neither differences between the sexes, nor between DL1- and DL2-children. There was an enormous variation between the children for all stylistic elements; the differences within groups (grades, sexes, and L1/L2) were greater than between groups.