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Het belang van taalbeheersing in onderzoek naar digitale communicatie

TvT coverWith the emergence of the internet and especially since the development of web 2.0, people increasingly communicate in an online environment. Be that as it may, this research domain has remained underexposed in Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing. The current special issue therefore addresses the importance of linguistic- and discourse-oriented research to explore the role of language in digital communication. On the one hand, the research papers in this issue investigate the influence of digital communication on communication styles. On the other hand, online genres are studied with large-scale corpora and (automatic) methods of analysis. We also highlight other research opportunities, such as whether digital communication changes the language use and proficiency of, for example, children and young people.

  • Hornikx, J., & Liebrecht, C. (2018). Het belang van taalbeheersing in onderzoek naar digitale communicatie. Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing, 40 (1), 1-12 [link].
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Writing assessment in higher education

dujal_pbThe present issue is a thematic issue on academic writing. It features nine papers that originate from an international symposium held at VU University Amsterdam in October 2011. At the symposium, which was organized by Rebecca Present-Thomas, Bert Weltens and John H.A.L. de Jong, papers and posters were presented that addressed different aspects of teaching and testing academic writing, with a special emphasis on the role of the Common European Framework of Reference, commonly known as CEF. Some of the papers represented here discuss attempts at relating local or national testing procedures to the CEF (Haapanen et al., Haines et al., Heaney et al.); others address the validity of writing tasks in a standardized writing test (Zheng & Mohammadi) and different methods for the classification of (higher) CEF levels (Present-Thomas et al.). Two papers present interesting attempts at identifying linguistic trends in higher-level learner English (De Haan & van der Haagen, Verheijen et al.). The last paper in the collection (Callies & Zaytseva) introduces a new corpus of academic learner writing and its potential use in assessing advanced writing proficiency.

  • Weltens, B., Hornikx, J., Lowie, W., Poelmans, P., & Present-Thomas, R. L. (2013). Writing assessment in higher education [A special issue of Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics]. Amsterdam: Benjamins. [link]