Research by Peter Broeder

Research

Culture Online

This research deals with Online Consumer Behaviour: exploring and explaining persuasivity in Webshops.
The focus is on:

cultural differences between internetshoppers
modality effects on information storage and retrieval
adaptivity of inherent parameters and landing pages
measuring implicit attitudes of cultural stereotypes

Language and Literacy for Educational Policy Realisation

Against the background of low literacy levels amongst children in South African schools and a simultaneous 'monolingualisation' of schooling in an officially multilingual policy environment, the overall aim of this research and development project is:

to develop a theoretical model of language policy realisation at the intersection of etic and emic levels of description, i.e. at the epistemic meeting point of policy 'from above' and 'from below';
to document teachers' language proficiencies and reading habits in one Cape Town educational district;
to improve reading and writing in selected primary schools and in the process foster a new South African linguistic citizenship;
to promote multilingualism through informed language planning at school and district level; and,
to assist in building the capacity for monitoring and self-assessment amongst key stakeholders in order to sustain such policy-related innovation. The study is in support of the imminent language policy for primary schools in the Western Cape, which is to make provision for mother-tongue based bilingual education and the phasing in of third-language tuition.

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Valuing All Languages in Europe (VALEUR project)

The overarching aim of the VALEUR project is to raise awareness of the resource represented by additional languages in use across Europe; and of the potential to capitalise on this resource in intellectual, cultural, economic, social, citizenship and rights contexts. More specifically, the project set out to map formal provision for additional language learning across Europe, to identify good practice and to make recommendations for providers and decision-makers, taking into account existing policy in support of plurilingualism and related instruments such as the European Language Portfolio.

VALEUR was supported by the European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) as part of its second medium term programme of initiatives to support Council of Europe language education policy, specifically on the theme of Languages for Social Cohesion. The second medium term programme began in 2004, and ended in autumn 2007.

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European Language Portfolio and Framework of Reference

A large number of different languages are spoken in Europe. Because of increasing mobility in Europe, old language borders are disappearing and new language borders are arising. Europeans often speak languages other than their mother tongue at home or in the street. Language learning not only occurs at school. Therefore, it is important to have a good insight into the way in which people learn languages, within a European context. Moreover, it is important to know what levels of language skills are achieved when people learn languages in formal as well as in informal contexts. In order to get a grip on the European language (learning) situation, two instruments were developed under the auspices of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg:

(1) A Common European Framework of Reference covering six language proficiency levels. This language scale can be used to compare language skills and certificates. For example, a pupil who studied French in high school can, when applying for an apprenticeship in France, give a potential employer a good idea of what such a diploma in French means.

(2) A European Language Portfolio: a comprehensive document that not only covers a series of formal certificates but can also document other language experiences, such as growing up in a multilingual home situation.

This site provides information on two language portfolio's that have been developed for primary schools in the Netherlands: a language portfolio for children and a language portfolio for teachers. (see also www.taalportfolio.com)

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Interethnic communication

This research project is a cross-linguistic and longitudinal study of language acquisition in adult migrant workers who acquire a new language without any formal instruction. These learners are in the seemingly paradoxical situation of learning to communicate in order to learn.

The aim is to investigate the ways in which adult second language learners use interactions with target language speakers to learn to understand.

Ethnographic conversation analysis of Learning to repeat to interact (Broeder (1992) and Learning to understand in interethnic communication (Broeder 1993) is used to shed light (1) on the way in which the interlocutors achieve a joint resolution of understanding, and (2) the effect on the process of acquiring the second language. The findings can be usefully applied both in language learning classrooms and in training and support for those people who are routinely involved in interethnic communications (Bremer et al. 1996, 1997).

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Educational policy on languages

Although Europe has had a long tradition of multilingualism and language contact, these characteristics have become even more prominent at the end of this century, as a consequence of international processes of migration and minorization. Multilingualism is a major dimension of Europe as an emerging multicultural society, and for many minority groups the home language constitutes a core value of ethnocultural identity. These issues will be highlighted from a demographic, sociolinguistic and educational perspective.

Demographic perspective

It is no easy task to present reliable statistics on the size and composition of immigrant minority populations in European countries. First of all, our focus will be on European and Dutch demographic trends and on different criteria for the definition and identification of population groups, i.e. nationality, birth country, self-categorisation, and home-language use.

Sociolinguistic surveys

Home-language is a complementary or alternative criterion of ethnic identity, with potential value for population statistics and in particular school statistics. Broeder & Extra (1995) carried out a Home Language Survey in the school year 1993/1994 with the support of the Ministry of Education amongst 34.451 elementary school pupils in the Netherlands. The survey has resulted in crosscultural evidence of ethnolinguistic vitality. Recently a large-scale home language surveys are carried out in South Africa (Durban, Kwa-Zulu Natal). Data on home language use of ethnic minority children are not only relevant for school statistics and sociolinguistic research. Such data are also indispensable prerequisites for educational policy.

Educational policy

Against the background of home language survey data, educational policy on home language instruction in Europe (i.e., Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and, Sweden will be discussed in terms of shifting perspectives and in terms of a search for a new balance in the roles and responsibilities of the national government, municipalities, and local schools (see Broeder & Extra 1997).

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Computer models of language acquisition

It is fascinating that people are able to learn a language (more or less) successfully despite the nature of the input.The target language made available to the learner is both an underdetermined variety (e.g. information on whether an utterance is grammatical or not is missing) and a degenerated variety (e.g. spoken language is full of flaws and inaudible elements). Two basic questionns about the nature and origins of language as an 'individual phenomon' (Chomsky 1986) are:

(1) What constitutes knowledge of language?

(2) How is knowledge of language acquired?

These questions are being addressed within different cognitive/computational models of language acquisition which derive from strongly contrasting research paradigms (see Broeder & Murre, 2001). The paradigms start from fundamentally different assumptions about language (symbolic or subsymbolic) and the mechanisms that drive the process of language acquisition (inductive or deductive).

Symbolic inductive learning.

Ever since the early sixties, it has been argued that the gap between the `poverty of stimuli' and the complexity of the language knowledge accomplished by the mature adult can only be explained under the assumption that human beings are equipped with an innate mental system. In most current perspectives, this mental system is described in terms of symbolically and categorically defined principles or rules .

Subsymbolic deductive learning

An alternative to symbolic accounts of language acquisition is offered by connectionism. The new development which has attracted most attention is Parallel Distributed Processing (henceforth: PDP) which assummes that individual components of human information processing (or acquisition) are highly interactive and that knowledge of events, concepts and language is represented diffusely in the cognitive system. Connectionist models do not directly encode symbolic information, but they rather represent knowledge in a distributed fashion: many, fixed elemant ('neurons') participate in a representation which is grade through their level of activation (Broeder & Plunkett 1994).

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Second language acquisition in adults

From 1982 to 1987 an international research project was initiated under the auspices of the European Science Foundation (ESF) in Strasbourg. This ESF-project was carried out in Great-Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Sweden. It focussed on processes of spontaneous (untutored) second language acquisition in adult immigrants in Western-Europe. The ESF-project is different from previous studies in that it has both cross-linguistic and longitudinal dimensions.