Taalgebruik in Schoolboeken en Anderstaligen in het Voortgezet Onderwijs

Young immigrant adults may have difficulties in schools because of a lack of literate skills in the second language, viz. Dutch. If they are confronted with texts that are too difficult for them they may stagnate in their (literate) language development and even drop out of school. Teachers with and without experience in teaching Dutch as a sec-ond language ranked a number of fragments of Dutch school-books as to degree of difficulty. All teachers believed that only the lowest difficulty level was appropriate for all their pupils (Dutch and immigrant). They differed in their judgement as to the appropriateness of the subject matter of the texts. An analysis of the texts with respect to linguistic features led to the definition of three levels of difficulty, correspon-ding to the three first grades of the secondary school. On the whole the texts are for Dutch natives. Immigrant pupils probably use certain strategies to compensate for evident lack of text comprehension at the micro level of a text (word know-ledge, sentence structures etc.)