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Effecten van semantisch georiënteerd grammaticaonderwijs op het redekundig ontleden van brugklasleerlingen

Dit artikel doet verslag van een kleinschalig onderzoek naar de wijze waarop de semantiek gebruikt zou kunnen worden om tot betekenisvoller ontleedonderwijs te komen. Voor dat onderzoek zijn twee vmbo-t/havo-brugklassen van het Valuascollege te Venlo met elkaar vergeleken: in de experimentele groep is gewerkt met semantisch georiënteerd materiaal; in de controlegroep is gewerkt op basis van de leergang Nieuw Nederlands, 4e editie (Barends et al. 2006), soms aangevuld met eigen oefenmateriaal in de stijl van de leergang. Om er zeker van te zijn dat beide groepen vergelijkbaar waren, is een voormeting gedaan, waaruit is gebleken dat de verschillen in grammaticaal inzicht tussen beide groepen minimaal waren. Aan het eind vond een nameting plaats in beide klassen. Hieruit bleek dat de experimentele groep, die gewerkt heeft op basis van de semantiek, aanmerkelijk hoger scoorde op drie punten: het ‘gewone’ redekundige ontleden, het herkennen van dubbelzinnige zinnen en het bouwen van zinnen volgens bepaalde patronen.

Grammatica bij laagopgeleiden? Ja!

Dutch teachers’ beliefs on linguistic concepts and reflective judgement in grammar teaching

Teacher beliefs have been shown to play a major role in shaping educational practice, especially in the area of grammar teaching―an area of language education that teachers have particularly strong views on. Traditional grammar education is regularly criticized for its focus on rules-of-thumb rather than on insights from modern linguistics, and for its focus on lower order thinking. A growing body of literature on grammar teaching promotes the opposite, arguing for more linguistic conceptual knowledge and reflective or higher order thinking in grammar pedagogy. In the Netherlands, this discussion plays an important role in the national development of a new curriculum. This study explores current Dutch teachers’ beliefs on the use of modern linguistic concepts and reflective judgment in grammar teaching. To this end, we conducted a questionnaire among 110 Dutch language teachers from secondary education and analyzed contemporary school textbooks likely to reflect existing teachers’ beliefs. Results indicate that teachers generally appear to favor stimulating reflective judgement in grammar teaching, although implementing activities aimed at fostering reflective thinking seems to be difficult for two reasons: (1) existing textbooks fail to implement sufficient concepts from modern linguistics, nor do they stimulate reflective thinking; (2) teachers lack sufficient conceptual knowledge from linguistics necessary to adequately address reflective thinking.

Perfect disguises

Dutch secondary school pupils seldom speak the foreign language in class, citing anxiety as a primary factor (Haijma, 2013). Implementing improvisational drama techniques (IDTs), however, could help ameliorate this situation by generating positive affective reactions, such as confidence and joy, and in turn stimulate pupils to speak. The concept IDT in this study contains two key elements. Firstly, participants take on roles in fictitious situations. Secondly, the activities must elicit spontaneous speech as to offer language learners opportunities to practice real-life communication, which is central to the goal of this research. The question driving this study was: What types of IDTs induce positive affective reactions among pupils and, as such, have the potential to stimulate spoken interaction in FL classrooms? The study yielded 77 IDTs associated with positive affective reactions through a literature review and an analysis of student teacher reflections on their IDT use in their English classrooms. This combined evidence lends credence to the conception that it could be the essence of improvisational drama that generates positive reactions, rather than the type of activity—the essence being an invitation to enter a fictional world, combined with the improvisational element that readies learners for spontaneous interactions.

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.

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