Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 56, Issue 3, 2018

This paper characterizes three views on learning and language development that successively prevailed over the last hundred years: (1) behaviorism and structuralism (1920-1960), (2) the Cognitive Revolution, including Chomsky’s generative linguistics (1960-1990), and (3) connectionism and Usage-based linguistics (1990-present). Because of the large distance between abstract constructs and empirical observations in all three approaches, it is difficult to empirically falsify theories in any of them. Views of the behaviorist/structuralist and of the generative schools can no longer be considered relevant for the teaching and learning of a foreign or second language, while some views of connectionism, Usage-based linguistics and Construction Grammar are. The paper is rounded off with some recommendations for second-language instruction, emphasizing the importance, for implicit learning of grammatical patterns, of word-by-word understanding of spoken language.

In spite of convincing empirical evidence for the implicit nature of second language acquisition, second language teaching is still largely based on explicit instruction. The discrepancy between research and teaching is caused by deeply rooted assumptions about language learning. One of the most critical assumptions is that there is a linear and causal relationship between explicit grammar instruction and the process of language acquisition. We learn, it is assumed, by internalizing explicit grammar rules and by storing declarative lexical knowledge.

In this contribution, I will show how, contrary to these assumptions, language acquisition is characterized by a dynamic process of development that is strongly individual and hard to predict. This dynamic view on language acquisition is supported by longitudinal studies of language acquisition in different domains.

This dynamic perspective of second language development has relevant implications for language instruction. The most important implication is that communicative interaction and intensive exposure to the second language, combined with systematic support of the language learner, stand a better chance of successful language learning than explicit instruction.

First-year students at the teacher training institutes for primary education and for secondary education in the subject of Dutch at the University of Curaçao generally speaking show low scores on Dutch language proficiency tests and poor study results. Bak-Piard et al. (2016) found that these poor results are related. In this contribution we will go into the language background of these first-year students and show that it is characterized by a large amount of diversity. This not only relates to the students’ first learned languages, but also to their earlier and actual home languages, their earlier and actual languages of instruction and the foreign languages they learned in the course of their educational career. This linguistic diversity, which is by no means an exception in the Caribbean, leads to a multitude of language practices that can be characterized as ‘polylingual languaging’, i.e. making meaning by using all the linguistic resources that these students possess in their rich linguistic repertoires. It goes without saying that such language practices can be easily at odds with schools’ linguistic normativity. The data that we present here give a clear insight in local linguistic diversity patterns and practices and provide a number of interesting building blocks for the development of an educational program for Dutch in the teacher training curriculum that fits the linguistic reality of the students and can contribute to improving their study results in the teacher training programs and making them better teachers in contexts of linguistic diversity in their future careers.

Central questions within L3 language acquisition research concern the activation of different background languages when it is the intention to use the L3. Why does the L1 serve as a source of transfer in some cases and the L2 in other cases? A number of explanations has been put forward. Some are based on structural or (psycho)typological similarities between languages while in others the L1- resp. L2-dominance within the learner’s mental network of linguistic knowledge is emphasized. The L2 status factor hypothesis (LSFH) claims that the L2 has a special status in the acquisition of an L3. This can be seen in syntax, even at an intermediate level (Bardel & Falk 2007). The question is whether, and in what way, LSFH applies when the L1 and L3 are more closely related and more similar to each other than the L2 and L3 are.

In this study we test four models of crosslinguistic influence by investigating German learners of Dutch with English as L2 and English learners of Dutch with German as L2. The task is a grammaticality judgement and correction task in order to get insights into intuitions about the target language. The two groups behave differently with regard to both acceptance and rejection of the test items. Our results clearly show both a positive and a negative transfer from the participants’ L2s, consistent with the predictions of the LSFH. Didactic implications for German learners of Dutch involve two types of individual scaffolding materials within task based language teaching: focus on form and enhancement of L1 metalinguistic knowledge.

This article aims at looking into the acquisition of the Dutch posture verbs staan ‘stand’, zitten ‘sit’ and liggen ‘lie’ by learners of Dutch at Stockholm University and Helsinki University. Firstly, this study presents a systematic semantic description which gives an outline of the uses of the Dutch posture verbs based on categories originating from Lemmens & Perrez (2010) en De Knop & Perrez (2014). Secondly a pilot study was conducted consisting of two cloze tests to see whether this semantic description can enhance the acquisition of these particular verbs. Finally, we discuss the outcome of the two cloze tests taken by the Swedish-speaking and the Finnish-speaking learners at the universities mentioned above. This part of the article also takes crosslinguistic awareness and CLIL (content and language integrated learning) into consideration as didactic tools when learning a third language.