Publication details
Reductieprocessen in het Nederlands. Een knelpunt voor een Tsjechische NVT-student?
| Title in English | Reduction Processes in Dutch. A Problem for a Czech Student of Dutch as a Foreign Language? |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Spoken Dutch has attracted the attention of researchers particularly in recent years, as it is the processes of reduction that characterise contemporary Dutch. Reduction is a phenomenon that occurs not only in the informal language but also in the formal language. Reduced variants occur in different forms and to varying degrees. Regular and irregular patterns of reduction are discussed in this context (cf. Ernestus, 2016). The regular patterns are easy to predict, the irregular ones are not. The Czech native speaker has been brought up with the idea that reduction in speech is something undesirable and that reduction is only a feature of a sloppy language, and the Czech NVT student therefore tends to claim that reduction processes are very rare in Czech compared to Dutch. However, recent research on spoken Czech proves the opposite. (Machač, 2013) However, Czech NVT students have great problems understanding reduced Dutch. In my research, I ask the following questions: what are the reduction processes in spoken language? Which types of reduction patterns are most problematic for Czech NVT students? At what level, according to the CEFR, are NVT students able to understand the language expression in which reductions occur? Does perceiving the reduction in Czech as something undesirable influence the understanding of the reduced speech in Dutch? My hypothesis is that NVT students are only able to decipher the reduced speech reasonably well at B2 level, but not in detail. Furthermore, I assume that even at the C1 level, the reduced speech is not understood down to the small details. In order to answer these questions, I will carry out an investigation into the intelligibility of the reduction processes in students at levels A2, B2 and C1. I will focus on the reductions at the word level and at the sentence level in order to determine where the stumbling blocks lie. As a starting point I will take the course Contact and the course Dutch to Perfection and their glossaries. Based on the vocabulary list and themes of these courses, I will compose an excerpt that will be presented as a dictation in a reduced and unreduced form to test subjects in order to determine which aspects of the reduction are the most problematic and at which level. |
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