Oordelen over Taalvaardigheid.

The language ability of children (age range: 4;0 - 10;0) was rated by their teachers on 35 scales. Separate factor analyses of the scales were done for the 741 Kindergarteners and the 1034 pupils of Primary Schools. Both analyses gave 5 identifiable factors : "disorderliness", "speaking ability", "defective listening ability", "defective speech** and "taciturnity". That the factors were almost the same for two groups of children being in different stages of development suggest that these judgments are influenced by an implicite theory about dependencies in language behaviour that is common to both groups of teachers: Therefore, one needs to be cautious in the use of this kind of judgment in psycho-logical assessment as well as in the interpretation of the relation between the factors and the other variables. Some of these relations are discussed. Girls appeared to score better than boys on three of the factors, in contrast to the conclusion of a review of research on sex differences that the verbal superiority of girls doesn't show in this age range. In line with the findings of many others, it was found that the higher the occupational level of the parents, the better the scores of their children on three of the factors. On four factors dialect speaking children did worse than children speaking the standard language, as expected. The lack of difference in "taciturnity" suggests that - at least in the opinion of these judges - the speakers of a dialect are not put to silence by the standard language of the school, as they are claimed to be. The low correlations between the factors and scores for reading and spelling raise doubts as to the diagnostic and prognostic value of this kind of judgments.