Bilingual education programmes have been increasing in popularity in the Netherlands. These programmes use language integrated learning: a pedagogical principle through which the material is taught...Show moreBilingual education programmes have been increasing in popularity in the Netherlands. These programmes use language integrated learning: a pedagogical principle through which the material is taught in a second language, often English. This thesis focusses on the effects of these programmes on pupils’ motivation to learn and to seek out native input, as well as on the influence these programmes have on students’ L2 phonology. More specifically, it analyses whether pupils are able to pronounce English word-final obstruents properly, both their voiced and voiceless variants. This is something that is particularly challenging, as prior research on the Marked Differential Hypothesis and Optimality Theory showed that voiced obstruents are a marked language feature of English, as well as one that is not present in Dutch. Through a digital questionnaire and a reading task, pupils from bilingual and monolingual streams of the same high school participated in this study. The research found no significant difference in the level of motivation or desire to seek out input between the two groups, but TTO students did use English captions more often when watching English films and series. Error analyses of the reading tasks of three pupils found that the TTO pupil did only devoice word-final fricatives, whereas the VWO pupils devoiced both the stops and the fricatives. Furthermore, other errors, such as applying the Dutch phonological rule of Regressive Voice Assimilation and altering the place of articulation, were only made by VWO pupils. Sending the recordings made by the pupils to native speakers confirmed that the TTO pupil did sound more native than the VWO pupils. However, due to the limited number of analyses, it can only be speculated what general effects bilingual education has on the L2 phonology of a wider variety of pupils.Show less
This thesis analyses the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and aimed to investigate how these types of motivation are related to bilingual education. The distinction between...Show moreThis thesis analyses the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and aimed to investigate how these types of motivation are related to bilingual education. The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation was based on Ryan and Deci’s theory on Self-Determination (2000a). Data for this research were collected by conducting 16 interviews with students from a school in the Netherlands that offered the option of a bilingual track. Of these 16 subjects, half followed the bilingual track on their school, while the other half did not. It was hypothesized that the students who followed the bilingual track were more intrinsically motivated than the students who did not. After analysing the interviews, and coding their answers, this hypothesis appeared to be correct.Show less
