Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 45, Issue 2/3, 2023

This study explores knowledge and self-efficacy beliefs about and skills of students from secondary education concerning writing paragraphs. Students in secondary school have to learn how to write coherent paragraphs because coherence within a text contributes to its comprehensibility. To this end four paragraph toolboxes for two genres (informative e-mails and persuasive texts) were developed, both for year-2 students (aged 13-14) and year-5 students (aged 16-17). The toolboxes are designed on the basis of four principles: pay attention to the norms for writing comprehensible paragraphs, start by presenting the genre-specific writing assignment as a whole task, have pupils complete a self-assessment in order to check the comprehensibility of the paragraphs, and work on part tasks. To explore knowledge, self-efficacy beliefs and skills of students, we conducted a questionnaire among 300 students and analysed more than 2100 of their paragraphs to find out if they comply with the paragraph norms. The research results indicate that there is no significant evidence that there exists a causal relation between the use of the developed paragraph toolboxes in education and the increase of knowledge, skills and self-efficacy beliefs. The paper discusses several possible reasons for his outcome.

Concreteness of texts: concreteness scores and a measuring tool

Experimental research into the effects of concreteness on comprehensibility, interestingness and persuasiveness of texts is often carried out by comparing versions of texts that differ in terms of concreteness. However, in previous studies concreteness has been manipulated in various ways, making it difficult to compare the experimental outcomes. Therefore, Brysbaert et al. (2014) developed a list of concreteness scores for 30,000 words, based on judgements of students. This list helps researchers to compare the concreteness of texts that have been manipulated for experimental research. Nevertheless, Brysbaert et al.’s (2014) list is incomplete, in the sense that it lacks homonyms, multiword expressions, neologisms and proper names. We have collected concreteness scores for words and word groups in these categories to supplement the ‘Brysbaert’ list. We have also developed the TABLET tool, which gives words in a text a part-of-speech tag, and then searches for the lemma form of the words in the list of concreteness scores as collected by Brysbaert et al. (2014) and us. This tool facilitates the process of determining and manipulating the concreteness of (parts of) texts, and can be used freely by researchers.

What role can communication play in solving big societal issues?

Communication has served humanity well. It thus makes sense that communication is perceived as a promising instrument for bringing about changes in human behavior that are necessary to solve major problems facing the world. However, to change behavior related to climate change, health, or the environment will require changing deeply held and emotionally charged beliefs. Recent research questions the ability of persuasive messages to bring about such changes: because the information differs from one’s existing beliefs, the message is often dismissed as unbelievable; and even if people are willing to look at the arguments, many in most cases lack the ability to appreciate those arguments. And those who are able to do so, are inclined to evaluate these arguments more critically. Communication probably can play an important role in bringing about the necessary changes but not as an instrument in itself.