Frans van der Slik

Authenticity of pronunciation in naturalistic second language acquisition: The case of very advanced late learners of Dutch as a second language

The article reports on the fourth study in a series of four designed to test the prediction that a nativelike accent is unattainable for those who start to acquire an SL after the close of the critical period. Sentences read out by late learners, who acquired Dutch in an immersion setting, were rated for accent by native speakers of Dutch. The results from this study, in combination with those from three previous studies, suggest that, in spite of the claims of the critical period hypothesis, late learners can achieve a nativelike accent in an SL, and that a combination of input, motivational, and instructional factors may compensate for the neurological disadvantages of a late start.

The refinement of a test of academic literacy

To ensure fairness, test designers and developers strive to make their instruments for assessing the language abilities of learners as accurate and reliable as possible, and have traditionally used a number of techniques to ensure this. From a post-modern, and especially critical perspective, however, these measures are not enough to ensure fairness. In these approaches, fairness is redefined and reconceptualised. This article demonstrates that it is still possible to use conventional techniques to achieve the goal of, for example, increasing the accessibility of a test. Using several statistical analyses of the results of a test of academic literacy as examples, the article concludes that traditional, quantitative measures enhance and complement, rather than undermine, current concerns.

Religion, Denomination, and Education in The Netherlands: Cognitive and Noncognitive Outcomes After an Era of Secularization

After 1850, The Netherlands developed into a strongly pillarized or denominational society. Starting in 1965, however, a process of secularization and depillarization emerged and the influence of the institutionalized denominations declined greatly. Today, there are indications that the process of secularization has reached its peak. Remarkably enough, such secularization and depillarization has had little influence on the educational system in The Netherlands. In this article, the relations between the religious affiliations of parents, the denominations of the schools attended by their children, and both the cognitive and noncognitive educational achievement of their children are examined. A representative sample of nearly 8,400 kindergarten students from 432 elementary schools is studied. The results show that the denomination of the school does not appear to affect educational results. Effects of the religious affiliation of the parents on the cognitive achievement but not the self-confidence or well-being of their children were found. When the socioethnic background of the students was taken into consideration, however, the observed effects disappeared.

Measures of improvement in academic literacy

This article considers the analysis of the results of a re-administration of a test of academic literacy, specifically with a view to determining whether this analysis yields insight into the improvement of levels of academic literacy over time. The article postulates that, if improvement occurs, the level of improvement will be uneven across different categories of ability, and across different levels of academic literacy as measured by various sub-tests. An attempt is made to offer explanations for the kinds of improvement that are evident, as well as to identify factors that may play a role in such improvement, such as the time of being exposed to a compulsory academic literacy development intervention, the mother tongue of the testee, and the initial level of academic literacy.

The Gender Gap in Second Language Acquisition: Gender Differences in the Acquisition of Dutch among Immigrants from 88 Countries with 49 Mother Tongues

Gender differences were analyzed across countries of origin and continents, and across mother tongues and language families, using a large-scale database, containing information on 27,119 adult learners of Dutch as a second language. Female learners consistently outperformed male learners in speaking and writing proficiency in Dutch as a second language. This gender gap remained remarkably robust and constant when other learner characteristics were taken into account, such as education, age of arrival, length of residence and hours studying Dutch. For reading and listening skills in Dutch, no gender gap was found. In addition, we found a general gender by education effect for all four language skills in Dutch for speaking, writing, reading, and listening. Female language learners turned out to profit more from higher educational training than male learners do in adult second language acquisition. These findings do not seem to match nurture-oriented explanatory frameworks based for instance on a human capital approach or gender-specific acculturation processes. Rather, they seem to corroborate a nature-based, gene-environment correlational framework in which language proficiency being a genetically-influenced ability interacting with environmental factors such as motivation, orientation, education, and learner strategies that still mediate between endowment and acquiring language proficiency at an adult stage.

The L2 Impact on Learning L3 Dutch: The L2 Distance Effect

Cross-classified random effect models (CCREMs) are often used for partitioning variation in both experimental and observational linguistic data. However, crossed random effects may have more complex interrelationships than is generally assumed. This becomes clear when comparing first language (L1) and second language (L2) influences on proficiency in Dutch as a third language (L3). Using a large database of L3 speaking proficiency scores, we assessed the mutual dependency between the crossed random effects of the L1 and the L2. The results suggest independent and robust linguistic distance effects of the L1 and the L2: the smaller the linguistic distance to the L3, the higher the L3 proficiency, with the L2 effect being weaker than the L1 effect. Although a model that incorporates an additional L1-by-L2 random interaction effect fits the data best, this model still stipulates the relative importance of an independent L2 distance effect. We found that the L1 distance effect is robust against the L2 distance effect and that the L2 distance effect is robust against interactive effects. We discuss possible explanations for interactions between the L1 and the L2. Overall, the data support independent linguistic distance effects of both the L1 and the L2, besides L1–L2 interactions. We recommend that researchers compare the fit of their crossed random effects models with the fit of models that also include the respective interaction effects.