Van Basiscursus Naar "Authentieke" Tekst

Abstract

The basic point behind the present paper is the general premise that the student, irrespective of the method of instruction followed, is suddenly confronted with a large number of new words at the point when he moves from pedagogically determined text material to "authentic" materials, such as newspaper articles, advertisement, literary texts, etc. An attempt is made to have a clear insight, both quantitatively and qualitatively, into the vocabulary gap that requires bridging, via an analysis of the type of newspaper extract used in class (for reading comprehension) and of Dutch essays produced by French-speaking pupils (for written production). These two elements are further compared with a basic vocabulary list and with essays produced by Dutch-speaking pupils in their mother tongue. The following conclusions become apparent : a) among the "outsiders", i.e. words not in the basic vocabulary, a restricted number of loanwords (+ 15 %) and non-derived or non-compound words (± 25 %) were noted; b) the majority of "outsiders" were derived or compounds and chiefly verb forms ; c) compared with their Dutch-language peers the majority of French-speakers in using the items referred to in (b) are less ready to "play" with lexical variants; d) the characteristic noted in (c) is not only attributable to a more limited competence in word formation but also due to the fact that bilingual dictionaries provide insufficient information on the nuances expressed through prefixes or particles. The above observations lead to the conclusion that it is desirable to direct more attention to non-inflectional morphology at all levels -university, teacher training in particular, textbook and grammar instruc-tion. Research and conclusions relate to the teaching of languages made up of a rich non-inflectional morphology (in this case Dutch) to native speakers of a language whose morphology is relatively poor in non-inflectional items (e.g. French), and are not necessarily applicable to other languages