| Abstract: | In the Netherlands, as in other Western European countries, many minority children are unsuccessful in their school careers. Their lack of achievement is associated with language and literacy problems. In secondary education they are faced with the task of text comprehension in the content areas, which is a reading task and a learning task at the same time. This study will report on the assessment of text comprehension in relation to vocabulary, grammar, non-verbal IQ and background knowledge about topics used in the text-comprehension test. Turkish and Dutch pupils took these tests during the first three years of their secondary schooling. In order to relate students’ different reading styles to their linguistic background (L1 or L2), three different subtests of text comprehension were used, each referring to a certain discourse level. It was found that the L2-readers tend towards a top-down approach of reading, which implies a stronger reliance on conceptual guidance than in L1-reading. With respect to the childen's reading development there was a significant increase in their scores for Word Knowledge and Non Verbal IQ, but there was no progress in the scores for Text Comprehension. Especially, Turkish pupils in the lowest type of the Dutch secondary-school system showed no progress at all. |
