Samenvatting
Heleen Polter (1954) graduated in General Linguistics and in Business Economics at the University of Amsterdam. She has been teaching Dutch as a second language since 1974 till now, with an interval of ten years in the nineties. In that period she studied and taught Economics. Later on, when she turned back to Dutch, she wondered if it was possible to formulate similar rules for the Dutch word order as she had found in Economics: simple but explaining complicated processes. She started to research the underlying structures of spoken language, and tried to look at it from the point of view of the outsider, carefully listening to the questions of her students and testing her findings during class. She ended up with seven rules for the apparent jungle of the word order that can serve as a simple guide when speaking.The result is this method in which the speaking skills, or better the conversational skills, are central, trained in a methodical way. The overall goal is to eliminate every insecurity, that will lead to a learning process that is as fast and efficient as possible.