Over the last few years the methods and techniques used in sociolinguistics have aroused keen interest and have continually been improved. Yet the claims that have been made about differences of degree between the language used by women and that used by men are often based on research methods which seem to be anything but reliable. On the basis of a corpus of 587 utterances produced in buying a train ticket, an investigation was made of whether there is a statistically significant difference between women and men in certain aspects of their language use which have been mentioned in the literature: the number of words used to deal with a set task, diminutives, civilities, forms of language expressing insecurity (repetitions, hesitations, self-corrections, requests for information). In addition to the independent variable of sex of speaker, three other variables were introduced: sex of addressee, age of speaker, and time of ticket purchase (rush-hour or normal). The results of our investigation indicate that there are few significant differences between the language used by women and that used by men in this particular situation, with regard to the variables mentioned above. As a consequence, this investigation has demonstrated once again that intuitions should be considered critically. It is remarkable, however, that sex of addressee seems to affect almost all of the variables under consideration. Consequently, the results strongly suggest that anyone who wants to investigate language by means of interviews must take into account the fact that the kind'[1] This article interprets the results of an investigation carried out by the members of the seminar on 'Language and sex', held at the Institute of General Linguistics of the University of Amsterdam in 1976-7. Participating in the seminar were: . We are very grateful to Margreet van Ierland and Catherine Snow, who helped with the statistical analyses. Furthermore, we are indebted to Simon Dik, Dell Hymes, Frank Jansen, and Pieter Muysken for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We thank the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Dutch Railway Company), which generously allowed us to use its facilities for performing the investigation. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Patricia Muysken for polishing our English. of language used does not depend only on the informant, but just as much on the addressee. (Language and sex, investigation methods, influence of addressee on speaker.)

Sociocultural theories based on the work of Vygotsky have been increasingly influential in educational sciences. Developmental education (DE) is a pedagogical approach based on Vygotskian theory that has inspired primary schools in the Netherlands to change the learning environment innovatively in a comprehensive way. In this article, we focus on the learning environment for reading comprehension of informative texts in upper-primary grade classrooms in DE. Our aim is to contribute to a more profound understanding of the characteristics of learning environments that are inspired by a Vygotskian approach and that are conducive to reading comprehension of informative texts. Five fourth-grade expert DE teachers participated in a multiple case study aimed at describing and analysing these characteristics for the domain of reading informative texts. Data were collected over a period of six to eight weeks for each teacher and consisted of videotaped interviews, classroom observations and documents. We conclude that DE learning environments are focused on maximising meaning from text for students. This is achieved by organising learning on the basis of emergent goals within students' participation in sociocultural practices.

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This study reports on the choice between a definite and an indefinite article by children with High Functioning Autism (HFA) and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). We carried out an elicited production task with 16 Dutch-speaking non-grammatically impaired children with HFA aged 6-13, 16 age-matched Dutch-speaking children with SLI, and 16 typically developing (TD) age controls. The results in the indefinite conditions reveal virtually no errors across groups. However, in the definite condition the HFA group, but NOT the SLI group, incorrectly produces indefinite articles significantly more often than the TD group. A more detailed analysis shows that 38% (6/16) of the children with HFA vs. 13% (2/16) of the children with SLI regularly produce indefinite articles in definite contexts. We propose that these children do not always calculate the additional (pragmatic) meaning of indefinites derived by scalar implicature (Horn 2006). Furthermore, development by age in the SLI group, but NOT in the HFA group, suggests that the failure to draw a scalar implicature is more persistent in children with HFA than in children with SLI. Concluding, our results show that non-grammatically impaired children with HFA are more prone to pragmatic impairments than children with SLI, suggesting a dissociation between grammar and pragmatics.

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d Faculty of education, Learning and Philosophy, inholland university of applied sciences, haarlem, the netherlands ABSTRACT Content-oriented reading interventions that focus on the integration of motivational enhancement and strategy instruction have been found to have positive effects. Developmental education (DE) in the Netherlands is an innovative content-oriented approach in which reading is an integral part of an inquiry-oriented curriculum. Reading for meaning is a central pursuit, and strategy instruction is functionally integrated. This study differs from previous studies in three aspects. Firstly, instead of interventions, two types of existing practices were compared: the DE approach and a textbook-driven programmatic instruction approach (PI). Secondly, this study accounted for classroom influences by conducting multilevel analyses. Thirdly, control variables, i.e. ethnic background, home language, SES, non-verbal IQ, gender, vocabulary and decoding skills, were taken into account. The effects of both approaches were investigated in terms of reading comprehension, knowledge of reading strategies and reading motivation. In a pretest-posttest natural two-group design, tests and questionnaires were administered to 570 grade 4 students in 24 schools. The outcomes that resulted from the DE approach were as good as those from the PI approach. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies that have reported better outcomes of content-oriented reading approaches than traditional and strategy reading approaches.

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