geert driessen & virigie withagen (1999) lcc language varieties and educational achievement of...

Language Varieties and EducationalAchievement of Indigenous PrimarySchool Pupils

Geert Driessen and Virgie WithagenInstitute for Applied Social Sciences (ITS), University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9048,6500 KJ Nijmegen, The Netherlands

This paper explores the relations between standard-language and arithmetic testperformance and a range of language-relatedfamily characteristicsin the Netherlands.The sample consists of 7730 pupils from nearly 700 primary schools. The variablesanalysed are: the language variety the child chooses in conversations with its father,mother, siblings and friends; the language the parents communicate in; the importancethe parents attach to their home language; the parents’ command of standard-Dutch;the parents’ educational level; the child’s gender; the province. The main question iswhether pupils who use standard-Dutch perform better than pupils who generallyspeak another language variety, i.e. a Dutch dialect or Frisian. The results show thatonly the parents’ educational level and the province are relevant in explaining differ-ences in standard-Dutch and arithmetic test results. Most remarkable are the resultsfrom Limburg and Friesland. On average the children from both provinces speaknon-Dutch in 47% of the language domains. Yet the pupils from Limburg perform bestand the pupils from Friesland worst on the standard-Dutch and arithmetic test, evenafter controlling for the family characteristics.Within these groups there are no differ-ences between the pupils who generally speak Dutch and the pupils who generallyspeak a Limburg dialect or Frisian.

IntroductionRecent Dutch studies into the effects of bilingualism on educational achieve-

ments have generally focused on non-indigenous pupils who are non-nativespeakers of Dutch. Research into the educational achievements of children whospeak a Dutch dialect or vernacular at home, which Dutch sociolinguisticsinitially concentrated on, has moved into the background. In this article we try tofill the gap that exists with respect to the school success of non-standard Dutchspeaking pupils in primary education. The article is built up as follows. First, wepresent a brief outline of the language situation in the Netherlands. Generallyspeaking the Dutch language area covers both the Netherlands and parts ofBelgium. In this article we will, however, restrict ourselves to dialects andvernaculars spoken within the boundaries of the Netherlands. Next, a number ofDutch studies into the use of dialects and vernaculars and educational achieve-ments are discussed. We present an outline of research that was carried out intothis area in the 1970s and 1990s. After that, we look at the design of the PrimaryEducation cohort-study. We used the data from this cohort to answer theresearch questions. The results of the analysis are dealt with next. This article isrounded off with a summary and conclusions.

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0790-8318/99/01 0001-22 $10.00/0 © 1999 G. Driessen & V. WithagenLANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CURRICULUM Vol. 12, No. 1, 1999

Indigenous Language Varieties in the NetherlandsA large number of different dialects are spoken in the Netherlands in addition

to the standard language, i.e. standard-Dutch. Dialects which lie very close toeach other in geographical terms, are often fairly easily understood by peopleliving in a particular area. As the distance between the dialects increases, itbecomes more difficult for people to understand each other. It is therefore noteasy to make a clear classification of separate dialects. Dialectologists oftendivide the Netherlands into a number of dialect groups (for an overview seeDaan & Blok, 1969).

In Figure 1 we present a topographical map of the Netherlands with its twelveprovinces. Within the Netherlands, the ‘Randstad’, which is situated in the prov-inces of Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland and Utrecht, is the economic, demo-graphic, political and cultural centre. The Randstad is a conurbation in themid-west, which encompasses the four biggest cities of the Netherlands:Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague and Utrecht. Outside that area the popula-tion density (largely rural areas) is much lower, in particular in the north(Friesland and Groningen) and the east (Drenthe) and south-west (Zeeland). Inthe latter provinces about half of the working population is employed in agricul-ture. The two southern provinces of Noord-Brabant and Limburg and the(eastern) provinces of Overijssel and Gelderland can be characterised as urban-

2 Language, Culture and Curriculum

Figure 1 The provinces of the Netherlands.

ised rural areas. Flevoland is the newest Dutch province, in fact a polder whichhas been reclaimed from an inner sea.

In the west of the Netherlands, the area between Amsterdam, Utrecht, theHague and Rotterdam, most people speak standard-Dutch. The dialects spokenin this area, in the provinces of Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland, are closest tothe standard language. Most people therefore do not see themselves as speakersof a dialect, even though their use of language has characteristicsof a dialect (VanHout, 1984; Hagen, 1989). Dialects have a relatively strong position in the north,east and south of the country. The general pattern is, the greater the distance fromthe west of the Netherlands, the greater the distance from the standard language(Hagen & Giesbers, 1988).

The Netherlands is one of the most urbanised areas in Europe. A lot of dialectsare therefore also city dialects, which largely have a low prestige. City dialectsare often associated with a lower social class. There are a few exceptions to this,such as the city dialect of Maastricht, which is spoken by all social strata of theMaastricht population and is more of an expression of regional or local identity(Hagen, 1989). The city dialects of Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland (e.g.Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague) are judged most negatively because thelink between dialect usage and socioeconomic status is most evident here. Oneresult of this stigmatisation is a reduction in the size of the dialect-speakinggroup. We increasingly see this development taking place also in cities outsidethe west of the Netherlands (Hagen & Giesbers, 1988).

Dialect-usage is more common in rural areas and in small towns than it is inthe cities. Rural dialects often have less of a stigma attached to them because theyare an expression of regional identity rather than low socialstatus.Here it is oftenthe case that people learn the standard language without giving up their dialect(Hagen & Giesbers, 1988).

In Friesland, situated in the north of the country, a minority language isspoken. Despite the strong influence of the standard language, the Frisianlanguage also has a strong position in particular in rural areas. In the cities ofFriesland a city dialect is spoken, which is a mixture of old Frisian dialects andDutch. Thanks to efforts of the Frisian movement and the Fryske Akademy,Frisian has been recognised by a European Charter. One of the reasons for recog-nising Frisian as a language is that there is a Frisian standard-language in addi-tion to the Frisian dialects. This political recognition of Frisian as a language hashad important consequences for instruction in the language and educationalpractice in the province of Friesland. Frisian has in the meantime become thelanguage spoken at all primary schools in Friesland, with the exception of someexempted schools (Van Hout, 1984, Ytsma & De Jong, 1993). In addition toFrisian, Low Saxon and Limburgs have recently been recognised as vernacularby a European Charter.

National figures on the use of dialects in the Netherlands, such as the ones thatare available for Low Saxon in Germany (Stellmacher, 1994), do not exist. Carefulestimates have been made, however, for example, by Boves & Vousten (1996).According to their analyses on average 12% of all parents speak a Dutch dialector Frisian with their child. They did however find major regional differences in

Language Varieties and Educational Achievement 3

this respect: in particular in the provinces of Overijssel, Drenthe, Limburg andFriesland a dialect is often spoken in the home situation. There are, furthermore,a number of sociolinguistic studies available carried out at a local or regionallevel, such as the one by Van Hout (1989) for Nijmegen.

In the Netherlands the use of dialect has declined considerably over recentdecades. The reduction in the use of the ‘old’ dialects is not only evident from thesmaller number of speakers, but also from the sociological and demographiccharacteristics of dialect-usage. The number of domains in which dialect isspoken has very much been reduced. There is a clear trend which shows thatdialect-speaking parents are increasingly starting to speak the standardlanguage with their children. It is becoming less common for people to speakonly dialect; they usually command the local dialect as well as standard-Dutch.In addition, the linguistic structure of dialects is moving more closely towardsthat of the standard language: new linguistic variants are developing includingvarieties that lie somewhere between a dialect and the standard language. Thisdevelopment of interim forms, ‘regiolects’, is taking place at all levels of thelanguage (Van Hout, 1984; Hoppenbrouwers, 1990).

Research into Language Varieties and EducationalAchievements

Dutch research carried out in the 1970s into the educational achievements ofdialect or vernacular-speaking pupils largely focused on a particular region ortown in the Netherlands. Wijnstra (1976) wanted to make a contribution towardsthe discussion on Frisian as a subject and as a language of instruction in primaryeducation. He did not find any differences in the written command of Dutchamong pupils at mono- and bilingual schools in Friesland who were beinginstructed in Frisian under various conditions. He also did not discover anydifferences between the Frisian children and a control group of rural pupils fromthe central Netherlands. The Frisian-speaking pupils did however score consid-erably lower on reading and language tests at the end of primary school thanthose in the rest of the Netherlands. The arithmetic scores of the Frisian groupwere also lower, although Wijnstra suggested in his comments that this might berelated to the amount of time spent on arithmetic in school. In the 1990s De Jong& Riemersma (1994) took another look at the educational achievements of pupilsin Friesland. They concluded that pupils at Frisian primary schools did not doany worse than those in the rest of the Netherlands. According to their study,instruction in Frisian therefore also does not have any consequences for thefluency in Dutch of the Frisian children.

The so-called Kerkrade-project consisted of a sizeable study which wascarried out in Kerkrade, a medium-sized town in the south of the Netherlands, inthe 1970s and early 1980s (Stijnen & Vallen, 1981). Pupils who had grown upspeaking the Kerkrade dialect had a poorer command of standard-Dutch thanstandard-languagespeakers, in particular when it came to their grammaticalandcommunicative command of the standard language and their participation inverbal interactions in class. Apart from this, the researchers came across hardly


any differences in the educational achievements. The dialect-speakers werehowever more frequently given lower recommendations for secondary educa-tion1 and more frequently had to repeat a year. The researchers thereforeconcluded that the assessments of the teachers were also being influenced bytheir attitudes towards the dialect. Another important finding from this studywas that the language factor and the social class factor each had an independenteffect on school achievement. This implies that the negative effect of dialectspeaking is felt in higher as well as in lower socioeconomic classes. In Kerkraderesearch was not only carried out into the educational achievements ofdialect-speaking children, but also into how the discrepancies established couldbe overcome. Once the dialect-speaking pupils were allowed to speak the dialectat school, the general achievement levels of these pupils were not any lower thanthose of their standard language-speaking fellow pupils.

Parallel to the Kerkrade-project a comparable study was carried out inGennep, a small city in the south-east of the Netherlands. The language back-ground of the pupils appeared to have a great deal less influence in the testsadministered here than in the Kerkrade-project (Giesbers et al., 1978).

After very little attention had been paid to the educational achievements ofindigenous bilingual children for quite some time, the subject was once again puton the agenda by some researchers in the 1990s. Results of a large-scale nationalstudy carried out in secondary education became available for the very first time.Boves and Vousten (1996) noted that the educational achievements of pupilswho spoke a variety of Dutch or Frisian with their parents were lower than thoseof children who generally spoke Dutch. For an explanation of the differencesestablished they refer to Jansen Heijtmajer and Cremers (1993) who also found adifference in the educational achievement levels of these pupils. The indigenouspupils in this study who generally spoke a dialect or Frisian at home, performedworse even than their non-indigenous (mostly Turkish and Moroccan) peers.The study concerned children whose parents had not obtained any qualificationsafter leaving primary school (low socioeconomic status parents). Boves andVousten (1996) agree with the theory presented by these researchers, that therecould be a link between the language spoken at home and the educational level ofthe parents and that this is the cause of the difference in the achievement levels. Inother words, the relation between language spoken at home and achievementsimplies a statistically spurious effect.

A recent study by Van Reydt (1997) focused on the opinions of teachers withrespect to the achievements of primary school pupils with a dialect background(compare the study of Stijnen & Vallen, 1981). The dialect-speakers wereassessed less favourably on various personality traits, including intelligence,than the pupils who spoke the standard language. In the last year at primaryschool they also less frequently received recommendations for higher forms ofsecondary education. These results were in sharp contrast to a direct measure-ment of the opinions of the teachers. From this they generally appeared to have apositive attitude towards dialect and dialect-speakers. The teachers, however,did not approve of the use of dialect in the school situation.

As mentioned in the introduction, the general aim of this paper is to clarify the


situation with respect to the school success of non-standard Dutch speaking chil-dren. To gain more insight into this situation we conducted an empirical study inprimary education. Central to this study is the question as to whether the use of aDutch dialect or Frisian in the home situation by pupils in the fourth year ofprimary education is related to their standard-Dutch and numeracy achieve-ments. Using analysis of variance and correlational analysis as the main tech-niques we will focus on answering the following sub-questions:

· What kind of relationships are there between the language the childrenspeak at home, the language the parents use among themselves, the impor-tance the parents attach to their children learning this language and theparents’ command of the standard-Dutch language?

· What kind of relationships are there between the language spoken at home,the standard-language and numeracy achievements and a number of back-ground characteristics, including province and the education of theparents?

Sample, Instruments and Variables

SampleThe data for this article were derived from the national cohort-study Primary

Education(‘PRIMA’). This concerns a longitudinal study in which information isgathered once every two years in primary schools from the school managementteam, the teachers, the pupils and their parents. The study was started in the1994/95 school year at almost 700 primary schools and involves a totalof approx-imately 70,000 pupils from Years 2, 4, 6 and 8. For an extensive account anddescription of PRIMA we refer to Jungbluth et al. (1996) and Van Langen et al.(1996).

In this article we make use of the data relating to pupils in the fourth year(approximately 8 years of age),2 concerning the results of a standard-Dutch andnumeracy test that the pupils completed, and a number of data on the pupils andtheir home situation collected with the aid of a written questionnaire completedby the parents. The information provided by the parents is available for a total of10,375 pupils (cf. Driessen & Haanstra, 1996). Within this group we made a selec-tion of those children of which both parents were born in the Netherlands, i.e. theindigenous pupils. The restriction to indigenous pupils meant that 7730 pupilsremained for the analyses.

Instruments and variables

The language testThe language test that was administered within PRIMA was specially devel-

oped for this study by CITO (National Institute for Educational Measurement).This test gives an indication of the general proficiency level in Dutch. The testconsists of 60 multiple-choice items and is made up of three types of exercises:morphological, syntactic and semantic. The pupils have to decide whether thewords presented have been correctly formed or formed according to conven-


tions, whether the build-up of the sentences presented is correct in terms ofgrammar and whether the meaning of the words, word groups and sentencespresented is correct (Van Bergen, 1987). The reliability of this test (measuredaccording to KR20) is high and amounts to 0.85 (cf. also Driessen et al., 1994).

Some (translated) examples of items from this test:

Is this how we say the following, YES or NO? ‘My father brought himself anew car’.

Is this sentence correct, YES or NO? ‘There goes he on his bicycle.’

Does this sentence make sense, YES or NO? ‘Pleasure is another word forfun.’

Does the part that is in italics make sense, YES or NO? ‘It is very important fora dog to get the right kind of food. A dog can get healthy as a result of eating thewrong kind of food.‘

The score on this test is determined as the total number of correctly answereditems. The average score is 47.8 with a standard deviation of 6.9 and an empiricalrange of 7–60.

The numeracy testThe numeracy test was also developed by CITO and covers a number of

numeracy skills: counting, ordering, structuring (numbers up to 100); automa-tion (numbers up to 10), division, addition and subtraction; calculations (up to100), additions and subtractions that do not go beyond ten; measurements (time,length, surface, roads, money). The test consists of 40 multiple-choice items; thereliability (established according to Cronbach’s Alpha) is high at 0.87.

Some examples (the exercises are read out loud by the invigilator; the pupilshave the test book containing the exercises in front of them):

9 can be divided into 6 and …

Ann has 20 guilders. She buys a pen for 7 guilders. How much money hasshe got left?

70 minus 20 is?

Here too, the score on the test is determined as the number of correctly answereditems. The average is 31.9 and the standard deviation 6.0, with an empirical rangeof 5–40.

The questionnaireThe parents of the pupils completed an extensive questionnaire. The ques-

tions, among other things, related to socio-ethnic background and cultural, reli-gious and educational aspects. In addition, several questions were asked aboutlanguage choice patterns and language proficiency. A number of these questionsare of importance to this article. From the child’s perspective, four of the ques-tions were related to the language they choose to use in conversations with fourgroups of people (domains):


‘Which language does the child generally use? (a) with the mother/carer;(b) with the father/carer; (c) with siblings; (d) with friends.’ The corre-sponding answer categories are: (1) Dutch; (2) a Dutch dialect or Frisian; (3)another language (e.g. Turkish or Spanish).

From the parents’ perspective, the following question relating to choice oflanguage was asked:

‘Which language do you generally speak with your partner?’ Here 18possible answer categories are presented, the first three of these are: (1)Dutch; (2) a Dutch dialect; (3) Frisian. The other categories involve foreignlanguages.

Also from the parents’ point of view, an attitudinal question was asked:

‘Do you feel it is important for your child to have a good command of thelanguage you speak with your partner?’ The answer categories are: (1) no,not important; (2) yes, somewhat important; (3) yes, very important.

Finally each of the parents were asked about their command of the Dutchlanguage. In this four language modalities were distinguished.

‘To what extent do you/does your partner have a command of the Dutchlanguage? Not including dialects and Frisian.’ (a) understand; (b) speak; (c)read; (d) write. The corresponding answer categories are: (1) poor; (2) fairlygood; (3) good.

In additionto the answers to the questions relating to the choice of language usedand command of the Dutch language, we also know which province the pupils livein (for a breakdown of the distribution see the last column of Table 1), the pupils’gender (50.7% boys) and the educational level of their parents. The latter is estab-lished as the highest level of education completed within the family (i.e. father andmother). The corresponding categories are: (1) no more than primary education; (2)junior secondary vocational education; (3) junior general secondary education oryears 1–3 of senior general secondary education/pre-university education; (4)senior secondary vocational education; (5) years 4–5/6 of senior general secondaryeducation/pre-university education; (6) higher professional education; (7) univer-sity education. The distribution of the pupils over the education categories is asfollows: 5.5, 16.3, 15.5, 21.3, 14.0, 20.6 and 6.8%.

Results

Choice of language and language proficiency

The informal spoken language used by the pupilsIn the question related to the informal spoken language generally used in the

four domains (with father, mother, siblings, friends) three answer categorieswere originally used. As a result of the selection of only indigenous pupils thenumber of parents that opted for the third option (‘another language’) was sosmall (maximum 0.2%), that we decided not to take this category into consider-


ation. Next we looked at the relationship between Dutch versus dialect/Frisianin the four domains; the percentages for Frisian and dialect have been addedtogether for this purpose. It appears that within the family this relationship isalways roughly the same. Of the children, 86.8% speak Dutch with their father,86.5% speak Dutch with their mother and 87.0% speak Dutch with siblings. Aslightly bigger proportion of the children speak Dutch with friends, i.e. 88.6%. Inorder to arrive at one score for these choices of language we carried out a prin-cipal component analysis. One general factor stands out here with 91.4%explained variance. The reliability (KR20) of this factor is 0.97. Subsequently anew variable was constructed by summarising the relative number of times thatthe children speak Dutch in the four domains. The score on this variable‘informal spoken language used by child is Dutch’ ranges from 0% (Dutch is notspoken in any of the domains) to 100% (Dutch is spoken in all of the domains). Inthe first column of Table 1 we present the distribution of this variable, in whichthe scores have been broken down according to province, and the mean score aswell as the standard deviation for the Netherlands as a whole are given. In addi-tion the Eta2 coefficient is given at the bottom of the table; this represents theproportion of explained variance.3 To give a topographical impression wepresent the mean scores broken down by province in Figure 1 as well.

On average the children speak Dutch in more than 87% of the four domains.This percentage varies a great deal, however, depending on the province thechild lives in. The Eta2 value gives an indication of this; from this it is possible todeduce that 28% of the variance in the informal spoken language used is relatedto differences between provinces. We can distinguish roughly three categories


Province LanguagechildDutch

LanguageparentsDutch

Importancelanguageparents

CommandDutchparents

Max.N

Groningen 87.9 58.1 2.38 2.94 237Friesland 53.3 42.2 2.49 2.94 423Drenthe 80.6 44.4 2.09 2.91 272Overijssel 92.2 64.3 2.35 2.93 890Flevoland 99.1 91.1 2.80 2.98 112Gelderland 97.0 77.5 2.59 2.94 885Utrecht 99.6 96.5 2.90 2.96 341Noord-Holland 96.7 95.9 2.87 2.96 872Zuid-Holland 99.2 98.0 2.91 2.96 1235Zeeland 85.1 69.1 2.55 2.96 171Noord-Brabant 95.7 81.3 2.64 2.92 1242Limburg 53.4 39.4 2.51 2.93 1049Eta2 0.28 0.23 0.10 0.01Total 87.2 73.9 2.63 2.94SD 31.9 43.9 0.68 0.16

Table 1 Informal spoken language used by the child Dutch, informal spoken lan-guage used by the parents Dutch, importance of learning informal spoken languageused by the parents and parents’ command of Dutch, per province (means)

here. In Friesland and Limburg the children speak Dutch in 53% of the domains.In Drenthe, Zeeland and Groningen the percentage lies between 80 and 90, whilein the other provinces this is more than 90. In Utrecht, Zuid-Holland andFlevoland the children speak Dutch in more than 99% of the domains.

In order to check whether there is any correlation between the pupil’s genderand the educational level of the parents, and the informal spoken language used,we have calculated the correlation coefficients. For gender this is 0.00 (p = 0.994)which shows that there is absolutely no correlation with the choice of languageused; for the educational level of the parents the coefficient is 0.11 (p =0.000),which points to a very slight correlation: children with parents with a higherlevel of education speak Dutch slightly more often.

The informal spoken language used by the parentsWith respect to the question relating to the informal spoken language used by

the parents among themselves we decided against taking the foreign languages(0.4%) into consideration.The result is the dichotomy Dutch versus Dutch dialector Frisian. The final score indicates what percentage of parents speak Dutch witheach other. The distribution on this characteristic per province can be seen fromthe second column of Table 1 and also in Figure 1.

Across the Netherlands as a whole, almost 74% of the parents speak Dutchamong themselves. In Limburg, parents speak the least amount of Dutch amongthemselves, i.e. 39.4%, followed by the parents from Friesland and Drenthe withrespectively 42.2 and 44.4%. In four provinces more than 90% of the parentsspeak Dutch: Zuid-Holland, Utrecht, Noord-Holland and Flevoland.

Here, too, we checked to see if there was any correlation between the informalspoken language used by the parents and their educational level. The correlationbetween both of these factors amounts to 0.14 (p = 0.000): parents with a higherlevel of education therefore speak Dutch slightly more frequently than parentswith a lower level of education.

If we compare the percentages with regard to the informal spoken languageused by the child with those related to the informal spoken language used by theparents (see Figure 1 or first and second column Table 1), it is noticeable that thepercentages vary considerably. In all cases it is true to say that the parents morefrequently speak dialect or Frisian among themselves than the children withparents, siblings and friends. The biggest difference occurs among the peoplefrom Drenthe: only 44% of these parents speak Dutch, as opposed to 81% of theirchildren. In provinces such as Groningen, Overijssel, Gelderland andNoord-Brabant there appears to be a similar generation effect. In provinces suchas Utrecht, Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland this is however hardly the case,although it must be mentioned that hardly any dialect is used here.

The importance of learning the informal spoken language used by theparents

Slightly more than 74% of the parents feel that it is also important for theirchild to have a good command of the language the parents speak among them-selves, almost 15% feel this is reasonably important and more than 11% feel that it


is not important. The mean score for the whole of the Netherlands is 2.63, butthere are considerable differences between the provinces. It is considered leastimportant in Drenthe (2.09) and most important in Noord-Holland andZuid-Holland, Utrecht and Flevoland (scores of 2.80 and higher).

The correlation with gender is -0.01 (p = 0.223),which points to the fact that theparents do not differentiate between boys and girls when it comes to the amountof importance they attach to their children learning their informal spokenlanguage. There is however a slight correlation with the educational level of theparents of 0.18 (p = 0.000): more highly educated parents attach more importanceto it than parents with a lower level of education. There also appears to be a verystrong correlation between the informal spoken language used by the parentsand the importance they attach to their children learning this language: r = 0.66 (p= 0.000). The parents who speak a dialect or Frisian among themselves have ascore of 1.89 on the importance they attach to their children learning theirinformal spoken language, while the parents who speak Dutch have a score of2.90. This difference amounts to approximately one and a half standard devia-tions. As a result it looks as though parents who speak a dialect or Frisian attachrelatively little value to passing that dialect or Frisian on to future generations.Closer analysis of these data makes it clear however, that it is possible to distin-guish two sub-categories within the category of parents who speak a dialect orFrisian. The first is made up of the parents from Friesland and Limburg, and thesecond of parents from the other provinces who speak a dialect. The mean scoresfor both groups are respectively 2.25 and 1.62, a difference of almost one stan-dard deviation. Within the category of Dutch-speaking parents there are virtu-ally no differences between the provinces as far as the importance they attach totheir children learning the informal spoken language is concerned. The conclu-sion therefore is that it is largely the dialect-speaking parents who do not comefrom Limburg or Friesland who do not attach a great deal of importance topassing on their dialect to future generations; the parents from Limburg andFriesland on the other hand do feel that this is important.

The parents’ command of DutchWith regard to the command of Dutch eight sub-questions were asked. It

should be remembered that this concerns self-reported language proficiency.Using principal component analyses we checked to see whether it would bepossible to reduce these questions to a more limited number of factors. It appearsto be possible to distinguish one factor that explains 43.2% of the variance. Thereliability of this factor (Cronbach’s Alpha) is 0.81. Here, too, we subsequentlyconstructed a new variable by summarising the scores on the eight questions anddividing them by the valid number of values. This gives the mean of the scores ofthe father and mother with respect to understanding, speaking, reading andwriting the Dutch language. The final score on this variable ‘parents’ commandof Dutch’ ranges from 1 ‘poor’, via 2 ‘fair’ to 3 ‘good’. In the third column of Table1 we present a summary of this variable, in which the scores have been brokendown according to province.

We can be quite brief when it comes to an explanation. The total mean score of


2.94 indicates that the parents are in general of the opinion that they have a goodcommand of the Dutch language on each of the modalities. The scores per prov-ince furthermore make it clear that there are hardly any differences in that respect;the Eta2 coefficient confirms this conclusion with only 1% explained variance.

There is a reasonably strong correlationof 0.26 (p = 0.000)between the parents’command of Dutch and their level of education: parents with a higher level ofeducation have a better command of Dutch than parents with a lower level ofeducation. There is a considerably weaker correlation of 0.14 (p = 0.000) betweenthe command of Dutch and the informal spoken language used by the parentswhen speaking among themselves.

Choice of language, language proficiency, and language andnumeracy skills

In Table 2 we present a summary of the language and numeracy skills of thechildren, as measured with the aid of the CITO tests, broken down according to anumber of the variables outlined above. We have condensed some of these vari-ables for the benefit of this presentation. We reduced informal spoken languageused by the child to three categories: (1) Dutch in none of the four domains; (2)Dutch in one to three of the four domains; (3) Dutch in all four of the domains. Theparents’ command of Dutch has been condensed to: (1) poor/fair; (2) fairly good;(3) good. In the case of the provinces a fourfold division was used based on acombination of, on the one hand, the unique character of the language/the dialectand, on the other hand, the relative number of times the children speak Dutch: (1)Friesland (because of Frisian, a Frisian vernacular or dialect); (2) Limburg (becauseof the Limburg dialect, i.e. language); (3) Groningen, Drenthe and Zeeland(because Dutch is spoken in less than 90% of the domains here); (4) Overijssel,Flevoland, Gelderland, Utrecht, Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland andNoord-Brabant (because Dutch is spoken in more than 90% of the domains here).The table not only shows the mean scores per category but alsothe Eta2 coefficients.

First, some comments with regard to language proficiency. The table shows thatas far as language proficiency is concerned, the informal spoken language used,by the child or the parents, makes very little difference. It explains only 1% of thevariance in language proficiency. The difference between the children whospeak Dutch in none of the four domains and the children who speak Dutch in allof the four domains is almost 2 points, i.e. two test items. When it comes to theeffect of the informal spoken language used by the parents on language profi-ciency, it appears that this also does not amount to more than 1% explained vari-ance. The effect of the parents’ command of Dutch on the language proficiency oftheir children is somewhat greater, i.e. 2%. The difference between parents whohave a poor to fair command of Dutch and parents who have a good command,however, is more than 3 points. The latter amounts to almost half a standarddeviation, which can be seen as a reasonably strong effect. The differencebetween boys and girls is not relevant with less than half a point. The biggestdifferences occur with respect to the educational level of the parents; this charac-teristic explains 6% of the variance. Major differences exist between the twoextreme educational categories: children of parents with at most primary educa-


tion do less well by more than seven items than children of parents with a univer-sity education; this difference represents more than one standard deviation. Thedifferences according to the amount of importance attached to learning theinformal spoken language are not relevant overall; but it is true to say that thechildren of parents who attach most importance to this have the highestlanguage scores. Finally, language proficiency is broken down according tovarious parts of the country. The Frisian children with a score of 45.2 are leastproficient in Dutch. The language proficiency of children from Groningen,Drenthe and Zeeland, where Dutch is spoken in less than 90% of the domains, isslightly better with 46.7 points. The language proficiency of the children fromLimburg and the children from the other provinces, where Dutch is spoken inmore than 90% of the domains, is the same. The latter is striking because the chil-dren from Limburg speak a dialect in almost half of the domains.

When it comes to numeracy skills we can be fairly brief. Even though there is aslight tendency for Dutch as the informal spoken language used by the child andinformal spoken language used by the parents to go together with betternumeracy skills, the differences are not relevant according to the Eta2 values. Therelevance of the amount of importance parents attach to their children learning


Language Numeracy Language NumeracyLanguage child Dutch Command Dutch parents0 domain 46.3 31.5 poor/fair 45.1 30.71-3 domains 47.0 31.5 fairly good 46.7 30.84 domains 48.1 32.0 good 48.4 32.3Eta2 0.01 0.00 Eta2 0.02 0.01Language parents Dutch GenderDialect/Frisian 47.0 31.6 boy 47.6 32.4Dutch 48.2 32.1 girl 48.0 31.4Eta2 0.01 0.00 Eta2 0.00 0.01Education parents Part of countryPrimary 43.9 29.2 Friesland 45.2 29.9Junior vocational 46.1 30.3 Limburg 48.1 33.0Junior general 47.0 31.6 Gr/Dr/Zl 46.7 31.5Senior vocational 47.6 31.6 Ov/Fl/Gl/Ut/

NH/ZH/NB48.1 31.9

Senior general 48.8 32.8 Eta2 0.01 0.01Higher professional 49.5 33.1University 51.2 34.4Eta2 0.06 0.05Importance language parentsNot important 47.2 31.6Somewhat important 46.7 31.1Very important 48.2 32.1Eta2 0.01 0.00

Table 2 Language and numeracy skills by choice of language, language proficiencyand background characteristics (means)

their informal spoken language, the parents’ command of Dutch, and genderalso appears to be very limited. Educational level appears to be the most relevantfactor here, too. The difference between the two extreme educational categoriesamounts to more than 5 points, or 0.87 of a standard deviation. As far as part ofthe country is concerned, we see that the children from Limburg score highestand those from Friesland score lowest.

If we compare the findings for language with those for numeracy, it is strikingthat with one exception the factors examined are hardly relevant when it comesto explaining the differences in language proficiency and to an even lesser extentthe differences in numeracy skills. The only thing that really matters is the educa-tional level of the parents. It is furthermore striking that the children fromLimburg do best in both language and numeracy, while they, together with theFrisian children, do not speak Dutch in much more than half of the domains. Thisstands out all the more, because the Frisian children do the least well in languageand numeracy (cf. also Van Langen & Vierke, 1992). For that matter, it is true tosay that within the group of children from Limburg and the group of childrenfrom Friesland there are no differences in language proficiency and numeracyskills according to the extent to which the parents or the children use a dialect.The respective achievements of the children from Limburg and Friesland, there-fore, do not appear to be affected by the extent to which standard-Dutch isspoken.

InterrelationshipsThe above findings show that the relationship between the various factors is

clearly not as unambiguous as it would appear to be at first glance. In order to geta better insight into this, we looked at the interrelationship between the variouscharacteristics. These have been presented in Table 3 in the form of correlationcoefficients.

In general in research methodology the criterion for the relevance of a correla-tion is put at a coefficient of approximately 0.15; this comes down to about 2%explained variance. From this point of view it becomes clear in our study that thenumber of relevant correlations is very limited. Children of highly-educated


Languageskills child

Numeracyskills child

Genderchild

Languagechild

Educationparents

Languageparents

Importancelanguage

Numeracy child 0.41Gender child 0.03 -0.09Language child 0.08 0.03 0.00Education parents 0.24 0.21 -0.02 0.11Language parents 0.08 0.04 0.00 0.61 0.14Importancelanguage

0.07 0.05 -0.01 0.19 0.18 0.66

Command Dutchparents

0.12 0.08 -0.01 0.11 0.26 0.14 0.17

Table 3 Relationships between choice of language, language proficiency and numer-acy skills and background characteristics (correlations)

parents with a better command of Dutch have a relatively high proficiency level,as well as children of parents who have a better command of Dutch. Childrenwho speak relatively much Dutch often also have parents who speak Dutchamong themselves. More highly educated parents speak Dutch slightly moreoften and also have a better command of Dutch. They also attach somewhat moreimportance to their children learning to speak the same language they speakamong themselves. Parents of children who relatively often speak Dutch alsoattach slightly more importance to their children learning that language. Finally,parents who speak Dutch relatively often and attachimportance to their childrenspeaking the language they speak among themselves have a somewhat bettercommand of Dutch. As far as numeracy is concerned there is only one relevantcorrelation with the educational level of parents: children of more highlyeducated parents do slightly better on the numeracy test than children of parentswith a lower level of education.

In order to get more insight in the interrelationship between the various char-acteristics and the language proficiency level and numeracy skills of the pupils,we finally carried out a number of variance and regression analyses.

First of all the results of the analyses in which the language proficiency level isthe variable to be explained. In an initial analysis we checked to see if the differ-ences between the various parts of the country continue to exist when one firsttakes the differences in the education of the parents into account. We thereforewanted to check whether differences in language achievements between variousparts of the country could possibly be the result of differences in the level ofeducation of the parents between different parts of the country. From this anal-ysis it became clear that educational level explains 6.1% of the variance and thatsubsequently the part of the country explains a further 1.1%. This is just as muchas in the bivariate analyses; compare Table 2. The analysis also shows that the Etaand Beta coefficients remain exactly the same (0.25 for education, respectively0.11 for part of the country); controlling for the other variable in the comparisontherefore has no effect.

Similar analyses were also carried out to see whether after controlling for theother characteristics (informal language child, parents’ command of stan-dard-Dutch, informal language parents, importance language parents) therewould still be some effect for part of the country. In all instances the Eta and Betavalues did not diminish by more than 0.01 after controlling, which means thatalso after controlling for the various characteristics the effect of part of thecountry remains the same.

In a final regression analysis we entered all of the above-mentioned character-istics: gender and informal language child, education, informal spoken languageand importance language parents, parents’ command of Dutch, and part of thecountry. As far as the latter is concerned we have formed a dichotomy: the prov-inces in which Dutch is spoken in about half of the domains (Friesland andLimburg) and the other provinces, where Dutch is spoken in more than 80% ofthe domains. We did this to check to see which of these characteristics carry mostweight when it comes to explaining the differences in the language proficiencylevels of children. The results can easily be summarised: the level of education of


the parents explains 5.6% of the variance, and the other five characteristics collec-tively less than 0.8%. The Beta of education parents amounts to 0.21; the highestBeta for the five remaining characteristics is the one relating to the parents’command of Dutch: 0.06.

The results with regard to numeracy skills hardly deviate from those related tolanguage proficiency. In general the percentages of explained variance are some-what lower and the Eta and Beta coefficients are slightly less strong. The correla-tions are however about the same as those for language.

Summary and Conclusions

SummaryIn short it is possible to draw the following conclusions:

· Nearly 13% of the Dutch indigenous children in the fourth year of primaryeducation occasionally speak a dialect or indigenous minority language(i.e. Frisian). There are considerable differences here, however, betweenprovinces. The use of dialects and minority languages is concentrated in theprovinces of Friesland and Limburg. In addition dialect is spoken relativelymore frequently, i.e. in more than 10% of the four distinguished domains, inGroningen, Drenthe and Zeeland.

· About 74% of the parents speak Dutch among themselves; a quarter ofthem therefore speak dialect or Frisian. This means that parents far morefrequently speak a dialect or Frisian than their children. The differencewithin the family is particularly great (more than 10% difference) inGroningen, Drenthe, Overijssel, Gelderland, Noord-Brabant and Limburg.

· More than 74% of the parents feel that it is important for their child to have agood command of the language the parents speak among themselves.There are however major differences here. In particular those parents whospeak a dialect among themselves and do not come from Friesland orLimburg attach the least importance to this.

· More highly educated parents have a better command of Dutch thanparents with a lower level of education. They also more often speak Dutch.There is only a weak correlation between command of Dutch and theinformal spoken language the parents use among themselves.

· The number of relevant correlations between language proficiency andnumeracy skills on the one hand, and, the other variables on the other, isvery limited. It is in particular the education of the parents that plays animportant role. In addition the parents’ command of Dutch is of slightimportance. Differences in language proficiency according to the informalspoken language used by the child, informal spoken language used by theparents and gender are very small.These differences are even smaller whenit comes to numeracy skills.

· The part of the country in which the child lives appears to be a relevantfactor in the relationship between choice of language and language profi-ciency and numeracy skills. It is clearly possible to distinguish parts of the


country in which a dialect or Frisian is spoken to a greater or lesser extent.At the same time these parts of the country also differ according to thelanguage proficiency and numeracy skills of the children, which further-more cannot be explained by other characteristics such as the level ofeducation of the parents.

Some methodological remarksBefore we continue with an elaboration and discussion of the conclusions, we

would like to draw attention to some methodological points.When looking for an explanation of the differences between Frisian and

Limburg pupils, the nature of the tests used in PRIMA might come into thepicture. These tests are of a multiple-choice character. While administrativelyconvenient, interpreting the tests’ results in some instances might pose aproblem. Regarding the validity, such tests have in general proved to be fairlygood predictors of secondary education levels. Still, an interesting point remainsas to whether syntactically and semantically differences between Frisian andStandard-Dutch on the one hand and between Limburgs and Standard-Dutch onthe other hand are reflected equitably in the test items. What is at stake here iswhether it is easier for the speakers of Limburgs to pick correct items by makinganalogies with their first language than for the Frisian pupils. Or, from anotherperspective, whether the Frisians are possibly more troubled with interferenceerrors than Limburgers. As to the question of the linguistic distance, there isevidence that the distance between Limburgs and Standard-Dutch is greaterthan that between Frisian and Standard-Dutch (cf. Hoppenbrouwers, 1990; DeJong & Riemersma, 1994; Ytsma, 1995). This actually means that the Limburgsspeaking pupils are at a disadvantagecompared with the Frisians, which impliesthat if the dialect were a relevant factor the Limburg pupils would perform evenless well than the Frisian pupils. Apart from this, studying item-bias (whenpupils from different subgroups, but of a similar skill level, stand an unequalchance of giving the proper answer to the item concerned) is extremely difficultand surrounded with a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity (cf. Hagen, 1989;Uiterwijk, 1994; Vallen & Stijnen, 1996).

Some of the variables analysed in this article pertain to self-reported languagebehaviour and language proficiency. Little is known as regards the validity of theanswers. As already stated in the introduction to this article, many people livingin the west of the Netherlands tend to see themselves as speakers of Stan-dard-Dutch, although their language use shows characteristics of a dialect (VanHout, 1984; Hagen, 1989). This would mean that the percentages in Table 1present an underestimation of the real dialect use in the west of the Netherlands.At the same time in some regions and cities dialect use is associated with lowsocioeconomic status (but certainly not everywhere; in the Limburg capital ofMaastricht, for instance, dialect use carries a lot of prestige; cf. Hagen & Giesbers,1988). As a consequence, this might lead to socially desirable responses, andagain to an underestimation of the real dialect use. Another point of discussionpertains to the parents’ assessment of their command of standard-Dutch. We do


not know whether their self-rated fluency in Dutch is accurate, and — moreimportant — whether this accuracy is similar for all the groups studied.

Although recent review studies (cf. Driessen, 1995) show that in explainingdifferences in achievement levels the parents’ educational level is a far more reli-able and stronger predictor than other socioeconomic status characteristics, weperformed some additional analyses with occupational status and familyincome. First we checked whether the Frisian and Limburg families differ instatus and income. This proved not to be the case. Next we carried out a series ofanalyses of variance to check whether after controlling for status and income thedifferences in achievement levels between Frisian and Limburg pupils remainthe same. The results showed that occupational status and family income do notinfluence the correlations between achievement levels and province. Further-more, this finding not only applies to the Frisian and Limburg pupils, but to thepupils from the other provinces as well. In other words: status and income do notadd anything in explaining the existing achievement differences.

DiscussionFurther to the conclusions presented earlier we would like to make a few

comments. From the above it emerges that social class (or one of its indicators,parental education) plays a relatively dominant role in explaining achievementdifferences. This is in line with findings as presented in the Dutch and interna-tional literature (cf. Rossi & Montgomery, 1994; Evans, 1995; Day, Van Veen &Walraven, 1997). Some of the studies that we reviewed in the first part of thispaper have explicitly taken social class into account when trying to explainlanguage differences between standard-Dutch and dialect speakers. The find-ings of these studies, however, were not unambiguous. Our study shows thatsocial class actually is the only relevant factor; the language factor is of no rele-vance. Differences with earlier findings might be related to the scope of our study(national instead of local or regional) and to the fact that we have used recentlycollected data.

The findings show that it is possible to speak of a development whereby lessdialect or Frisian is being spoken from generation to generation. This languageshift and erosion of dialects and Frisian are an almost universal phenomenon (cf.Hagen, 1987;Fishman, 1991). There is a clear parallel here with the language situ-ation of non-indigenous people; compare for example Driessen (1992, 1997). Itfurthermore appears that parents feel that it is less important for their children tolearn to speak the dialect correctly. This in particular applies to the parents whodo not originally come from Friesland or Limburg; parents of children fromFriesland and Limburg attach relatively more importance to it. These findingssuggest that the dialects and indigenous minority languages are slowly dyingout (cf. Ytsma, 1995; Ytsma et al., 1994). Just exactly at what kind of pace this islikely to happen is still unclear (Van Hout, 1984). Moreover, the language shiftdoes not necessarily mean that these will in all cases be replaced by Dutch. Thereare signs that developments are taking place in the shape of ‘regiolects’(Hoppenbrouwers, 1990).


Another point concerns the effect of the part of the country. From our data it isnoticeable that the children from Limburg perform best in both language andarithmetic, while their Frisian peers perform worst in both tests. This is strikingbecause this is coupled to the fact that children from Limburg and Frieslandspeak about the same amount of Dutch. It has furthermore been shown that thisis not due to possible differences in the educational level of the parents. Withrespect to non-indigenous children in this context, the interdependence and thethreshold hypotheses by Jim Cummins may be significant (Cummins, 1991). Arough interpretation of these two hypotheses is that the language proficiencylevel in Dutch is dependent on the proficiency level in the language spoken athome (i.e. dialect or Frisian) and that a certain level needs to be achieved in bothlanguages before bilingualism can be expected to have positive effects on cogni-tive development. There are two important conditions for success, namely thatthe children have to be exposed to Dutch to a sufficient degree (at school or in thehome environment) and that they have to be sufficiently motivated to learnDutch (see also De Jong & Riemersma, 1994). Quite apart from the fact that thesehypotheses are extremely hard to prove empirically (cf. Driessen, 1996), they donot provide any clues as to why the children from Limburg perform much betterthan the children from Friesland. This finding in fact does not match the expecta-tions at all. After all, in Frisian primary schools Frisian is a subject and a languageof instruction (although the extent of this strongly varies from school to schooland in general is very limited; cf. Inspectie van het Onderwijs, 1989), Frisianfurthermore has a great deal more status as a language (although the Limburgdialect has recently also been officially recognised as a European indigenousminority language) and there is a written standard variant of Frisian.

One possible explanation for the differences between Friesland and Limburgwhich is occasionallyput forward is that it could depend on the differences in thetypes of schools available. In Limburg there are a lot of schools for special educa-tion (for children with learning difficulties and behavioural problems), whilethere are only very few of these schools in Friesland. This means that Frisian chil-dren are more frequently forced to stay in regular primary education, while theirpeers from Limburg are referred to special primary education (cf. Petersen &Oudenhoven, 1994). The better performance of the children from Limburg could,therefore, be because the very worst performing pupils are no longer in primaryeducation there and can, therefore, also no longer bring down the average testscores, which is the case in Friesland. This explanation, however, is notcompletely satisfactory. In 1997 a national newspaper started to publishso-called league tables of secondary school attainments. From these tables itbecomes clear that the differences that exist in primary education are present insecondary education as well: the secondary schools in Limburg perform best.Until now no explanation has been found for this phenomenon.

What are the consequences of this for the didactic approach in primary educa-tion? In the Kerkrade-project it was noted that dialect-speaking children fromLimburg in primary education performed less well in terms of language thanpupils who did not speak a dialect (Stijnen & Vallen, 1981). Our study does notconfirm this conclusion (some 15 years on), when one takes the educational level


of the parents into account. While children from Limburg do extremely well,children from Friesland do extremely poorly. Our study does not confirm thatthis is due to the fact that they speak relatively little Dutch. Closer analysis showsthat on average all Frisian children perform badly, regardless of how much stan-dard-Dutch they speak. As a result of this, there appears to be little reason for notusing the native language in class (cf. Orstein-Galicia, 1994), Although it shouldbe noted that research in this area has not as yet led to uniform outcomes.

AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank Ton Goeman of the Meertens Institute

(Amsterdam) for his help with the topographical map of the Netherlands. TheFoundation for Behavioural and Educational Sciences of the Netherlands Orga-nization for Scientific Research (NWO, the Hague) is gratefully acknowledgedfor providing the data of the cohort-study Primary Education on which theempirical part of this article is based.

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Dr Geert Driessen, Institute for

Applied Social Sciences (ITS), University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9048, 6500 KJNijmegen, The Netherlands ([email protected]).

Notes1. When the children are in the last year at primary school, they have to choose a second-

ary school. The parents will get advice in this from the head teacher or the child’s classteacher. This recommendation largely depends on how well the child is doing atschool.

2. Dutch primary education is intended for 4 to 12-year-olds and consists of eight years.In the first two years (the infant school years) play takes up a central place; in the thirdyear formal instruction in reading, numeracy and writing commences.

3. As far as the p-values are concerned we would like to point out that they are less infor-mative here; when analysing such large groups of pupils diferences very soon aresignificant.

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geert driessen & virigie withagen (1999) lcc language varieties and educational achievement of...

Education

dutch language area

standard language

dutch dialect

dutch sociolinguistics

withagen language

home language

language variety

range of language