Synthesis:Transdisciplinary perspectives on second language acquisition: exploration versus explanation

The relationship between psycholinguistics and SLA is put in historical, metatheoretical perspective: from 1910 to 1960, from 1960 to 2000, and from 2000 to the present day. The potential of a transdisciplinary perspective on SLA is discussed from the perspective of critical rationalism (Popper). The bottom line is that transdiciplinarity is not a goal in itself. Exploration must be followed by explanation, explanatory claims must be falsifiable, and empirical research must be conducted with scientific rigor. The chapter ends with directions for future research

Reading comprehension level and development in native and language minority adolescent low achievers:Roles of linguistic and metacognitive knowledge and fluency

In a longitudinal design, we measured 50 low-achieving adolescents’ reading comprehension development from Grades 7 to 9. There were 24 native Dutch and 26 language minority students. In addition, we assessed the roles of (a) linguistic knowledge, (b) metacognitive knowledge, and (c) reading fluency in predicting both the level and growth of reading comprehension. Students improved in reading comprehension, the language minority students more so than the native Dutch students. We can explain the level of reading comprehension by linguistic and metacognitive knowledge, whereas most fluency-related predictors appeared to be of minor importance. We can hardly explain the growth in reading comprehension by the predictors. Nevertheless, we found a significant interaction indicating that growth in vocabulary explained growth in reading comprehension for the language minority students. This finding seems to suggest that language minority students profit from gains in vocabulary, more so than native students

Writing proficiency level and writing development of low-achieving adolescents: The roles of linguistic knowledge, fluency, and metacognitive knowledge

In a longitudinal design, 51 low-achieving adolescents' development in writing proficiency from Grades 7 to 9 was measured. There were 25 native-Dutch and 26 language-minority students. In addition, the roles of (i) linguistic knowledge, (ii) metacognitive knowledge, and (iii) linguistic fluency in predicting both the level and development of writing proficiency were assessed. Low-achieving students improved in writing proficiency, the language-minority students more so than the native-Dutch students. Regarding the level of writing proficiency, individual differences between low-achieving adolescents could be accounted for by receptive vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and speed of sentence verification, suggesting that these are important components in low-achieving adolescents' writing. Regarding development in writing proficiency, grammatical knowledge predicted variation between lowachieving students. Explanations and educational implications of these findings are discussed

Inferring trust

In this paper we discuss Liau's logic of Belief, Inform and Trust (BIT), which captures the use of trust to infer beliefs from acquired information. However, the logic does not capture the derivation of trust from other notions. We therefore suggest the following two extensions. First, like Liau we observe that trust in information from an agent depends on the topic of the information. We extend BIT with a formalization of topics which are used to infer trust in a proposition from trust in another proposition, if both propositions have the same topics. Second, for many applications, communication primitiv