Summary DVA3E+DVB3F

Relation speakers: Friends, Colleagues

List of Topics:  
Linguistic research, second language acquisition, 
participants Turks and Moroccans, 
musicality and language acquisition, music education, 
grammar of languages, systems of languages

Summary: 2 Speakers (M64E and F29F)

F29F begins the conversation by explaining the methodology of her
research. She says that she thinks it is difficult to encourage the
participants to talk for a long time. She wants to study their usage of
language  in general and what kind of errors they make. The focus group
of her study are highly educated Turks and Moroccans who are in an early
acquisition stage and have come to the Netherlands to study. She
mentions that Turks and Moroccans usually come to the Netherlands to
study technical or economic studies, not linguistics. 

They now discuss the differences in proficiency of speakers. This
difference may be influenced by their mother tongue. M64E says that some
people have better auditive skills. F29F mentions that she has read a
dissertation on musicality and the ability to learn a language, not a
lot of research has been done in this field. This reminds M64E of a girl
who was not able to hear differences in tonal heights but was able to
learn languages. F29F says she will have trouble with learning tone
languages. This brings the speakers to the topic of music education.
They share their experiences with music education when they were in
school. 

The speakers discuss that education in schools has changed. M64E notes
that parsing down to the level of the clause is not taught anymore. He
thinks that explaining how the system works is convenient for the
children. F29F does not understand people who think that grammar is
difficult because it explains the system of languages. M64E does not
think that the Dutch grammar is difficult. F29F agrees and gives an
example from her focus group. M64E says that he did not like to discover
grammatical rules himself. F29F says that discovering yourself may
stimulate intrinsic motivation. 

