Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing. Jaargang 29

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Abstracts Volume 29 no.4 2007

Roel Vismans
University of Sheffield, UK
Forms of address in Dutch and Flemish recruitment advertisements for executive jobs

ABSTRACT: This article reports on a quantitative investigation into the current use of Dutch forms of address (i.e. second-person pronouns) in recruitment advertisements for executive jobs in both the Netherlands and Flanders. Some of these advertisements only use formal pronouns, others only familiar ones. The article's theoretical background is provided by the socio-linguistic literature on forms of address and by intercultural communication, and its findings are based on a corpus of advertisements from the websites of two national recruitment agencies. It also draws parallels with other Germanic languages.

KEYWORDS: forms of address, intercultural communication, socio-linguistics

Naomi Kamoen, Bregje Holleman en Huub Van Den Bergh
University of Utrecht
How easy is a non-difficult text? A meta-analysis on the effect of question wording in measuring the perceived quality of texts

ABSTRACT: If we want to measure how subjects perceive the quality of a text, questionnaires with scalar questions are often used. What does the respondent think, for example, of the difficulty of the text? Questions about these kinds of topics can be posed on three different scales: a negative Likert scale (The text is difficult. Agree - Disagree), a positive Likert scale (The text is easy. Agree - Disagree) and a semantic differential scale (The text is... Easy - Difficult). It is assumed that respondents give the same answers to all three questions. A group of MA Communication studies students tested whether or not this assumption is true. In this article a metaanalysis of their studies is described. The goal was to test whether or not an effect of question wording can be generalized over studies and over word pairs. The choice of wording appears to be crucial in measuring opinions about texts. For every word pair an effect of question wording was found. For ten of the thirteen tested pairs, the effect can be classified as ‘large’. For four of

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these pairs, more variance is explained by the question wording than the amount of variance explained by the topic of the text. The respondent often expresses his opinion more positively on a negative Likert-scale, than on the other two scales.

KEYWORDS: Likert scale, semantic differential scale, measuring text quality, wording effects

Antoine Braet
University of Leiden
Did the researchers of the speech communication departments betrayed their cause? An overview of the research in the field of ‘Taalbeheersing’ (Speech Communication) (1980-2005)

An analysis of the VIOT proceedings from 1984, 1993 and 2005, the volumes of the periodical Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing covering the same years (including the preceding two years) as well as of the 101 dissertations published from 1980 till 2005 reveals a remarkable development of the research in ‘Taalbeheersing’ (Speech Communication). Within the field of applied-oriented research, research in language skills (education) has rather strongly decreased. However, one notices an increase in document design. On the level of more fundamental research, the interest in conversation analysis has weakened, the study of argumentation is holding steady at a high level whereas linguistic discourse study has at present even defeated the study of argumentation. More recently, the applied language researchers in ‘Taalbeheersing’ are moving from the field of language skills (education) towards document design. This trend is the major cause of the considerable decrease in the research in the field of language skills (‘the betrayal’). Besides, the important increase in document design also is a result of the expansion of Speech Communication research at the departments of CIW outside the Dutch language studies.

KEYWORDS: speech communication, study of argumentation, conversation analysis, study of language skills, discourse studies, document design