Projects

The aim of the proposed research project is to explore the localised ways in which teachers, students and school management staffs handle, negotiate and navigate migrant-background studentsU+2019 multilingual repertoires in a post-monolingual societal condition. Ethnographic research using a variety of qualitative methods will be conducted in two matched urban secondary schools
which contrast in their pursued language policies.

This project studies variation in the way parents address their children, focusing on parents’ selection of Colloquial Belgian Dutch (‘tussentaal’, e.g. gij ‘you’) or Standard Belgian Dutch forms (e.g. jij ‘you’).

Through structured variation between standard and vernacular, parents implicitly teach their children which language features (and varieties) to use in which context, hence at the same time revealing which language features ...

Received a subsidy from the Province of Vlaams- Brabant for setting up a support program in childcare.

Many of the unique syntactic features of Dutch dialects spoken in Flanders only occur in very

specific discourse contexts, and therefore cannot be researched using existing databases and

linguistic atlases, as those are based on elicited data, not spontaneous speech. At Ghent University,

783 tape recordings (c. 700h) of spontaneous dialect speech from all Dutch-speaking provinces in

Belgium and from French Flanders ...

The transition from secondary to tertiary education is often conceived as difficult, into a new culture with specific rules, conventions and language use (van Kalsbeek & Kuiken, 2014). In Flanders, where, except for Medicine and Dentistry, there are no entry requirements or selection mechanisms, the follow-up of incoming students is important. Success rates of first-year students are low, at the KU Leuven in 2015-2016 for example, less ...

This project wants to investigate how the speech community of tomorrow, viz. elementary school children evaluate the use of English words in a Dutch context, which contextual parameters affect their evaluation and whether an evolution is visible in the dimensions shaping these attitudes as children grow older. By focusing on these questions, the project I am proposing intents to break new ground in the study of social meaning of English ...