The ability to read in a second language (L2) for academic purposes is essential for higher education students. Dutch colleges increasingly use materials in English or teach in English. This can be challenging for L2 readers, especially students entering higher education from vocational studies, who may have less experience with L2 academic…

Two studies investigated the effects of errors in German business letters written by Dutch students. Gaining insight into these effects is important since Germany and the Netherlands are one of the largest economically interdependent partnerships. One hundred and fifty-six German professionals rated letters with errors and letters without errors…

In 3 ERP experiments, we investigated how experienced L2 speakers process natural and correct syntactic input that deviates from their own, sometimes incorrect, syntactic representations. Our previous study (Lemhöfer, Schriefers, & Indefrey, 2014) had shown that L2 speakers do engage in native-like syntactic processing of gender agreement but…

The results of a self-paced reading study with advanced German, Dutch and French second language (L2) learners of English showed that their online comprehension of early closure (EC) sentences which are initially misanalysed by native English speakers (e.g. "While John hunted the frightened rabbit escaped") was affected by whether or…

This study compared how lexical quality (vocabulary and decoding) and executive control (working memory and inhibition) predict reading comprehension directly as well as indirectly, via syntactic integration, in monolingual and bilingual fourth grade children. The participants were 76 monolingual and 102 bilingual children (mean age 10 years,…

In a longitudinal design, we measured 50 low-achieving adolescents' reading comprehension development from Grades 7 to 9. There were 24 native Dutch and 26 language minority students. In addition, we assessed the roles of (a) linguistic knowledge, (b) metacognitive knowledge, and (c) reading fluency in predicting both the level and growth of…

In this study, we analysed the relationships between word decoding, vocabulary knowledge, meta-cognitive knowledge and reading comprehension in low-achieving adolescents and examined whether the strength of these relationships differed between Grade 7 and 9 students and between monolingual and bilingual students. Tests were administered to 328…

The present article examines production and on-line processing of definite articles in Turkish-speaking sequential bilingual children acquiring English and Dutch as second languages (L2) in the UK and in the Netherlands, respectively. Thirty-nine 6-8-year-old L2 children and 48 monolingual (L1) age-matched children participated in two separate…

Assesses text comprehension of secondary Turkish and Dutch pupils in relation to vocabulary, grammar, nonverbal IQ, and background knowledge. Finds that the L2-readers tended toward a top-down approach to reading. Finds a significant increase in scores for word knowledge and nonverbal IQ but no progress in the scores for text comprehension. (SR)

Describes the way foreign languages have been taught in the Netherlands, the way reading comprehension in a foreign language is tested there, and educational objectives that should be taken into consideration in teaching foreign languages. (GT)

The procedures for the construction of the Dutch national exams of reading comprehension and for setting cut-off scores have remained roughly unchanged over 20 years. Construction procedures are characterized by thorough screening rather than pretesting; cut-off scores are influenced by procedures and percentages fails rather than by equating. Two…

Compares reading and spelling development of native Dutch-speaking children and minority children in the first two grades. Finds that the minority children kept up with the native Dutch-speaking children on word blending and word decoding tasks, but not on spelling and reading comprehension. Suggests that children learning to read in a second…

The question of how a scientific researcher copes with a text written in a language which he or she does not adequately understand is examined in this Dutch language study of Dutch preservice engineers. Although French, German, and English are traditionally taught in secondary schools in the Netherlands, French gives Dutch engineers the most…

Compares the acquisition of vocabulary by Dutch advanced students of French reading a French story in one of three text reading conditions: marginal glosses; dictionary; or control. Results indicate that frequency of word occurrence fosters incidental vocabulary learning more when the first two conditions exist. (40 references) (Author/CK)

The research project reported in this paper had two aims: to demonstrate what standard multiple-choice questions and two new varieties (multiple-choice cloze and guided summary test and to assess whether the new formats test the same skills. To find out what the various question formats test, the study looked at a battery of tests, each of which…