“My research interest has always been in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), which might have had something to do with the teachers at the English department at the University of Groningen. At the time, they were much more psycholinguistically and practically oriented than the teachers at the linguistics department. My research is about the development of second language knowledge and the impact of input characteristics, explicit instruction and awareness. After my PhD, I applied for a postdoc position here at the UvA. I was part of a big research project on listening and comprehension. I did that for four years and then applied for my current position as assistant professor at the Dutch department. I really like the combination of teaching and research. I’m very lucky because I teach in an MA-program (Dutch as a second language and Multilingualism) that is very close to my area of expertise. This means that I can learn a lot from my students; we can get some research done that is relevant for my own work.”

Bilingual daycares

“We recently won a project that is financed by the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs. In the past, there have been similar pilots with bilingual secondary education and primary education,  in which a few schools were given the possibility to offer bilingual education (meaning that 50% of the instruction is in Dutch and 50% is in English) to see what the effects of that would be, whether it might be harmful to students’ Dutch. . This project does the same, but then looks at zero- to four-year-olds by studying bilingual daycares, that offer both Dutch and English or French. How much English do such children develop, and how does it impact on their Dutch? What are good conditions and how should it be organized? Those are the kinds of questions we are trying to answer.”

Interdisciplinarity

“I like to be inspired by other fields. SLA has traditionally looked at psychology and psychological methods. I could easily work together with psychologists on the theme of awareness. However, when you work in academia, you often have some sort of home turf. For me that is SLA: I know many people and many people know me, it has its own debates, jargon and traditions. I guess researchers are strongly shaped by the particular area they work in and the connections that they make in the field. It’s easy to stay within that field and never look outside”

Conceptually accessible research

“I have also always identified as an applied linguist. I’m interested in questions that have practical implications. Quite frankly, I find it difficult to imagine research that is without implications. I think it is important that you can explain why it is valuable to investigate something and what the value of that knowledge may be. I don’t mean economic value here and I also do not mean that research must have immediate practical implications. But you should be able to explain why the knowledge that you are seeking is valuable. I have been thinking about this a lot lately because of a project I am deeply involved in, the OASIS project: OASIS [Open Accessible Summaries In Language Studies, red.] is an attempt to make research more systematically accessible. Together with colleagues in the UK and the US we want to make sure that people outside of academia can read about what we are doing and can take stock of the knowledge we are gathering. The idea follows from open access movements, which try to make research accessible to anyone. Open access is fine, but accessibility is still limited because our publications are generally very hard to read and understand for people outside our own areas of expertise. Research needs to be made conceptually accessible too. We aim to do this by making the production of accessible summaries an integral part of the publication process. We are now negotiating with a number of journals in our field to encourage them to embrace a system that requires authors to write summaries that are readable for a very large audience. Imagine google scholarfor non-scholars.”

(You cannot) leave it to the press

“All this is necessary, because so little of what we do reaches potentially interested parties. We saw this ourselves when investigating the use of research findings outside academia. We also had a colleague in Canada look at what ultimately received attention in popular media and that really is a bit disconcerting. First of all, hardly anything gets to the media, and when things do, it is mostly because is the findings are perceived to be spectacular or funny (“alcohol makes you more fluent”). Many people have genuine questions about language and language development; parents, for example, raising their child bilingually. They hear now that it will make their kid smarter, but there is a lot more to it. OASIS could be a great place for people with such questions.”

Bridging the gap between research and practice

“Part of the problem is that our main goal as researcher is to publish in the big journals, so our main incentive is not to ensure that our findings are translated to larger audiences. However, the knowledge we gather is very relevant. I read my colleagues work and they read mine, and this way we build on each other’s work. But it takes such a long time for that knowledge to end up with parties that may benefit from it. Once knowledge is made accessible, it is ready to be used. Don’t get me wrong, there are many initiatives to bridge the gap between research and practice, but they are mostly incidental. It would be very helpful if we could systematically produce conceptually accessible knowledge.”

Starting point

“The starting point of my research can be many different things. If you finish a study, it typically raises more questions and you follow up on your own work. Another way is through teaching. Students can ask very interesting questions, that can inspire me, also through their internship experiences. The OASIS project has driven me to do research on teacher competence and professionalization. I also get inspiration from reading some of the books in psychology and learning how they write about cognition and cognitive systems and seeing how this is related to my work.”

Future plans

“Ideally, I would like to earn a pot of money to do some more systematic work on the role of awareness in language learning. The kind of work that I’m doing now, but with more resources. However, I have many projects going on and I would be very happy to keep these going. I am very pleased with my position here at the Dutch department and the ACLC and the teaching and research I get to do.”