scholarly journals The role of majority and minority language input in the early development of a bilingual vocabulary

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
JELSKE DIJKSTRA ◽  
FOLKERT KUIKEN ◽  
RENÉ J. JORNA ◽  
EDWIN L. KLINKENBERG

The current longitudinal study investigated the role of home language and outside home exposure in the development of Dutch and Frisian vocabulary by young bilinguals. Frisian is a minority language spoken in the north of the Netherlands. In three successive test rounds, 91 preschoolers were tested in receptive and productive vocabulary in both languages. Results showed a home language effect for Frisian receptive and productive vocabulary, and Dutch productive vocabulary, but not for Dutch receptive vocabulary. As for outside home exposure, an effect was found on the receptive vocabulary tests only. The results can be explained by the amount of L2-input that participants received. The Dutch input is higher for participants with Frisian as home language compared to the Frisian input for participants with Dutch as home language. The conclusions lead to further implications for language professionals working in language minority contexts.

2010 ◽  
Vol 84-85 ◽  
pp. 83-92
Author(s):  
Jelske Dijkstra ◽  
Folkert Kuiken ◽  
René Jorna ◽  
Edwin Klinkenberg

Gathercole & Thomas (2009) concluded that Welsh children easily gained proficiency in the majority language (English) whereas the acquisition of the minority language (Welsh) lagged behind due to reduced input. Does this trend also occur in other minority language contexts, e.g. for Frisian in a context where Dutch is the majority language? In this longitudinal study, 98 toddlers were tested every six months for 1.5 years with respect to their receptive and productive vocabulary in Frisian and Dutch. Our research question was: what is the influence of the home language on the acquisition of Frisian and Dutch? Results from the first round of measurements indicate that an effect of the home language is present with respect to Frisian receptive and productive vocabulary and Dutch productive vocabulary. Interestingly, no effect of the home language is found on Dutch receptive vocabulary: for Dutch receptive vocabulary, it does not seem to matter whether a child has Frisian or Dutch as their home language.


1979 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart van Steenbergen ◽  
Gordon Feller

This essay looks at the actual and potential role of emerging alternative life-style movements in dealing with the crisis of overdevelopment in the advanced industrialized nations. It examines the problems posed by overdevelopment and shows how two alternative life-style movements - the North American Movement for Voluntary Simplicity and the New Life-style Movement in the Netherlands - represent positive responses to them. Their values, objectives, as well as their potential impact upon their societies are analysed and critically examined. In this critique, the authors consider the conditions under which alternative life-styles might be more widely adopted in First World societies in general.


1990 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 433-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Peterson

ABSTRACTTo be well understood, narratives need to be embedded within appropriate contextual information. The early development of key orientation (participants, location and time) was traced with an 18-month longitudinal study of real-experience narratives produced by 10 children aged approximately 2–3; 6. Listener knowledge or inference was required to decode most named participants and many were not specified at all. There was no developmental improvement. Orientation to when was rare at first and involved formula words indiscriminately applied. There was steady developmental improvement in frequency as well as differentiation of time references. where information was more common at all ages, particularly when the narrated events occurred away from home. It also showed developmental improvement, but only for away-from-home locations. Overall, very young children can produce narratives in an unscaffolded context to adults unfamiliar with their experiences. The potential role of parental scaffolding in teaching orientation skills is discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Helga Kuipers-Zandberg ◽  
Ruth Kircher

SummaryThe study presented here is the first contemporary investigation of the subjective compared to the objective ethnolinguistic vitality of West Frisian. West Frisian is a minority language spoken in the province of Fryslân, in the north of the Netherlands. The objective ethnolinguistic vitality of the language was established on the basis of policy documents and statistical data. To investigate the subjective ethnolinguistic vitality of the language, rich qualitative data were gathered by means of a questionnaire, which – due to low literacy rates – was administered to West Frisian speakers (N=15) in person. The primarily open-ended items in the questionnaire targeted different aspects of the three main socio-structural factors that constitute the ethnolinguistic vitality of a language: that is, status, demography, and institutional support. Content analysis was performed on the questionnaire data, using rounds of deductive and inductive coding and analysis. The results suggest that West Frisian has a certain amount of vitality, which constitutes a good basis for language planning to ensure its continued maintenance. Moreover, the findings indicate that overall, the subjective vitality tallies with the objective vitality in terms of status, demography, and institutional support. However, two aspects raised concern among the participants: firstly, as part of the status of West Frisian, there was concern about the language's presence in the linguistic landscape (where subjective vitality matched objective vitality, but participants explicitly expressed the desire for a more persistent and pervasive presence of the language in public spaces); and secondly, as part of the institutional support for West Frisian, there was concern about the role of the language in the education system (where subjective vitality did not match objective vitality). The article discusses what implications the findings of this exploratory study – should they hold true – would have for language planning in the province of Fryslân.


2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNICK DE HOUWER

This article reports on a study that addresses the following question: why do some children exposed to two languages from early on fail to speak those two languages? Questionnaire data were collected in 1,899 families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than the majority language. Each questionnaire asked about the home language use of a family consisting of at least one parent and one child between the ages of 6 and 10 years old. The results show that the children in these families all spoke the majority language, but that minority language use was not universal. Differences in parental language input patterns used at home correlated with differences in child minority language use. Home input patterns where both parents used the minority language and where at most one parent spoke the majority language had a high chance of success. The “one parent–one language” strategy did not provide a necessary nor sufficient input condition. Implications for bilingual families are discussed.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lotte van Doeselaar ◽  
Wim H. J. Meeus ◽  
Hans M. Koot ◽  
Susan Branje

This 4-year longitudinal study examined over-time associations between adolescents’ educational identity, perceived best friends’ balanced relatedness, and best friends’ educational identity. Adolescents (N = 464, Mage = 14.0 years at baseline, 56.0% males, living in the Netherlands) and their self-nominated best friends reported on their educational commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration. Target adolescents also reported on the level of balanced relatedness provided by their best friend. Cross-lagged panel models showed that balanced relatedness significantly predicted adolescents’ reconsideration, and was predicted by in-depth exploration and, in an inconsistent pattern, by commitment. Best friends’ educational identity did not positively predict adolescents’ educational identity. Perceiving a best friend as high on balanced relatedness seems to reduce adolescents’ problematic educational reconsideration, while, in turn, adaptive educational identity processes might foster balanced relatedness.


Author(s):  
Linda MEIJER-WASSENAAR ◽  
Diny VAN EST

How can a supreme audit institution (SAI) use design thinking in auditing? SAIs audit the way taxpayers’ money is collected and spent. Adding design thinking to their activities is not to be taken lightly. SAIs independently check whether public organizations have done the right things in the right way, but the organizations might not be willing to act upon a SAI’s recommendations. Can you imagine the role of design in audits? In this paper we share our experiences of some design approaches in the work of one SAI: the Netherlands Court of Audit (NCA). Design thinking needs to be adapted (Dorst, 2015a) before it can be used by SAIs such as the NCA in order to reflect their independent, autonomous status. To dive deeper into design thinking, Buchanan’s design framework (2015) and different ways of reasoning (Dorst, 2015b) are used to explore how design thinking can be adapted for audits.


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