De Schriftelijke Taalvaardigheid van Franstalige en Nederlandstalige Leerlingen uit het Nederlandstalig Onderwijs in Brussel

In Brussels, the officially Dutch-French bilingual but predominantly francophone capital of Belgium, a monolingual Dutch-medium and French-medium school system operate in parallel and independently from each other. Lately, an increasing number of francophone parents have sent their children to the Dutch-medium schools in, expecting that this will provide them with the 'immersion experience' felt necessary to become bilingual in French and Dutch. There has been much debate about the effects on the pupils of the complex multilingual environment in the Dutch-medium schools which has thus been created. This article reports on an analysis of Dutch writing proficiency of both French and Dutch-speaking pupils in these Dutch-medium schools. Quantitative measures of linguistic complexity, accuracy and productivity were used to assess the Dutch academic written production of 60 pupils from two age levels. Significant differences between the Dutch and the French pupils were mainly found with respect to accuracy.