7 Cultural Biases in Second Language Testing of Children

Background Knowledge, Linguistic Complexity, and Second-Language Reading Comprehension

“…Children with a Christian background turned out to have higher comprehension scores on a text describing a Christmas celebration. Kerkhoff and Vallen (1985) studied the relation between cultural origin of a text and second-language reading comprehension of Dutch, Turkish, and Moluccan children living in the Netherlands. They found a clear interaction between text and ethnicity, indicating a facilitating effect if the children's background and the cultural origin of the text matched.…”

Language and ethnic minorities in the Netherlands

“…Three different responses were possible: 'Dutch item preferred', 'Turkish item preferred', and 'no preference'. Kerkhoff and Vallen (1985) investigated the effect of the cultural background of tests on Dutch-language performance of 10/11-year-old Dutch, Turkish, and Moluccan children (n = 92). Unfortunately, Teunissen did not correlate these findings statistically with the results of the Ll (Turkish) and L2 (Dutch) tests performed by the children.…”