Literacy education in secondary schools is experienced as dull and ineffective. We investigate how reading and writing education in lower grades of vmbo-tl and havo can be made more challenging and meaningful through a cross-curricular genre-pedagogical approach. Students learn to deliberately apply genre knowledge in Dutch and history lessons. With teachers we design lesson units for deliberate genre literacy. Effectiveness is tested in a large-scale intervention study. A cross-curricular genre pedagogy is expected to increase students’ knowledge, skills and motivation. We also investigate what subject-specific didactic expertise is needed for teachers, and what it yields for integration between curriculum subjects.

• prof. dr. Ted Sanders
• dr. Erwin Mantingh
• dr. Renske Bouwer

• dr. Ninke Stukker (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
• dr. Jannet van Drie (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
• prof. dr. Carla van Boxtel (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
• dr. Jeroen Steenbakkers (Hogeschool Windesheim)
• Stefan Glasbergen (Hogeschool van Amsterdam)
• prof. dr. em. Kees de Glopper (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
• prof. dr. Wilbert Spooren (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen)

EU-COST program for academic exchange

Effective discourse in any language is characterized by clear relations between sentences and coherent structure. But languages vary in how relations and structure are signalled. While monolingual dictionaries and grammars can characterise the words and sentences of a language and bilingual dictionaries can do the same between languages, there is nothing similar for discourse. For discourse, however, discourse-annotated corpora are becoming available in individual languages. The project will facilitate European multilingualism by (1) identifying and creating a portal into such resources within Europe - including annotation tools, search tools, and discourse-annotated corpora; (2) delineating the dimensions and properties of discourse annotation across corpora; (3) organising these properties into a sharable taxonomy; (4) encouraging the use of this taxonomy in subsequent discourse annotation and in cross-lingual search and studies of devices that relate and structure discourse; and (5) promoting use of the portal, its resources and sharable taxonomy. With partners from across Europe, TextLink will unify numerous but scattered linguistic resources on discourse structure. With its resources searchable by form and/or meaning and a source of valuable correspondences, TextLink will enhance the experience and performance of human translators, lexicographers, language technology and language learners alike.

• prof. dr. Ted Sanders
• Jet Hoek MA

State-of-the-art machine translation (MT) systems, especially statistical but also rule-based
ones, operate in a sentence-by-sentence mode, and do not propagate information through the series of sentences that constitute texts. Such a propagation is however helpful, and sometimes even indispensable, to make correct translation choices for words and phrases that depend on previous ones. The goal of MODERN is to model and automatically detect such dependencies, and to study their integration within MT, with the aim of demonstrating improvement in translation quality.
The focus of MODERN is on the interplay between referring expressions such as noun
phrases and pronouns, which must be coherently translated throughout a text, and discourse relations between sentences, which are often conveyed by explicit connectives that are notoriously difficult to translate. MODERN will study joint computational models of discourse entities and discourse relations in texts, based on linguistic theories and experimental grounding, and the inclusion in such models of automatically generated domain-knowledge related to the discourse entities. MODERN will design and implement these probabilistic models, and integrate them with operational MT systems, both rule-based (Apertium) and statistical (Moses).
Particular attention will be paid to the evaluation of MT improvement, studying the eect on
human readers of various translation options for discourse entities and connectives, and aiming to optimize MT output in this respect. The MODERN project will focus on four languages {English, French, German and Dutch} for which the partners have considerable expertise. Two domains will be used as case studies: Alpine texts from a multilingual corpus of Alpine Club yearbooks (Text+Berg) and texts on environmental legislation and debates extracted from the JRC-Acquis, DGT-Acquis, and Europarl parallel corpora.

• prof. dr. Ted Sanders
• Jet Hoek MA

De hoofdvragen van dit onderzoek zijn: Hoe verloopt het leesproces van vmbo’ers bij het lezen van verhalende teksten en studieboekteksen en hoe kunnen we dat leesproces vergemakkelijken? Het vmbo is de grootste onderwijssector binnen het voortgezet onderwijs. Hacquebord (2007) laat zien dat een kwart van de vmbo’ers niet in staat is de studieboekteksten te begrijpen.

Land (2009) toont aan dat vmbo’ers lezen ook niet leuk vinden en de studieboeken saai vinden. Land laat daarnaast zien dat bepaalde tekstkenmerken van invloed zijn op de begrijpelijkheid en de waardering van studieboekteksten. De vmbo’ers blijken ten eerste profijt te hebben van coherentie. Leerlingen begrijpen een tekst beter wanneer de structuur van de tekst expliciet is gemarkeerd dan wanneer deze impliciet is gelaten. Ten tweede blijken vmbo’ers identificerende studieteksten meer te waarderen, maar die teksten leveren lagere scores op tekstbegriptoetsen op dan distantiërende teksten.

Het offline-onderzoek van Land roept allerlei vragen op. Wordt de identificerende tekst anders verwerkt dan de distantiërende tekst? Leidt een identificerende tekst de aandacht af van de belangrijke informatie? Gebruiken betere lezers andere leesstrategieën dan zwakke lezers? Allemaal vragen die nog niet zijn beantwoord.

Het huidige project probeert deze leemte te vullen. Op grond van de resultaten van procesonderzoek kan worden nagegaan wat de theoretische verklaring is voor de gevonden effecten onder vmbo’ers. De praktische toepassing is dat we adviezen kunnen opstellen hoe onderwijsteksten te formuleren en kunnen zwakke lezers geïnstrueerd worden hoe ze een tekst moeten lezen. Coherentiemarkering (expliciet versus impliciet) en identificatie (identificerend versus distantiërend) zullen in dit onderzoek de twee tekstvariabelen zijn waarvan we het effect op het leesproces van vmbo’ers nagaan. Ook het type lezer (zwakke versus sterke lezers) en het genre (zakelijke versus narratieve teksten) zullen in ons onderzoeksdesign worden opgenomen.

• prof. dr. Ted Sanders

Causal relations between discourse segments can be expressed by connectives like because and so. What does it mean when speakers use one of two similar connectives rather than the other? How do language users process causal relations? And how do children acquire these textual building stones?

These are important, essentially unanswered questions about discourse, a key component of human communication. This program studies human cognition by investigating the mechanisms underlying discourse coherence. Starting from the challenging idea of a direct link between linguistic categorization and cognition, causal connectives are investigated. Recently established (text-) linguistic insights suggest Causality and Subjectivity are salient categorizing principles.

The central hypothesis is that, together, these principles account for causal coherence and connective use, and play a pivotal role in explaining cognitive complexity in discourse. This hypothesis is tested in three subprojects, investigating:
1. connectives in spoken and written discourse in Dutch, German and English
2. the acquisition of connectives and
3. on-line discourse processing.

Causality is considered a universal principle, which is systematically encoded in language. The way Subjectivity - distinguishing between causality residing in the world or in the speakers mind - cuts up the causal lexicon, is expected to vary across languages and (spoken versus written) modalities. Causality and Subjectivity are hypothesized to determine the complexity of causal relations are considered more complex than additice relations. This inherent complexity should account for connective acquisition - rather than parental input does - and discourse processing - rather than schematic expectations do. Using the innovative, multi-disciplinary methodology of concerging evidence, the program integrates (sub) disciplines that have hardly been related: (text-)linguistics, analysis of spoken and written corpora, language acquisistion and discourse processing. Results are likely to clarify previously unsolved issues in language use, which implies a significant contribution to a Cognitive Theory of Discourse Representation.

This project is currently being continued in other projects.

Keywords: Causality, Subjectivity, Connectives, Discourse processing, Language Acquisition

• prof. dr. Ted Sanders