De ontwikkeling van lesmateriaal voor vergevorderde NVT-studenten: broodnodig of een brug te ver?
| Title in English | The Development of Course Materials for Advanced Students of Dutch as a Foreign Language: Filling a Gap or a Bridge Too Far? |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description |
Course materials for advanced students of Dutch as a Foreign Language are scarce and existing text books almost exclusively focus on Netherlandic Dutch. To fill this gap, our plan is to develop a course in which both Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch are represented. In order to design a course that meets the needs of the target group – master students of Dutch in Central Europe – and that successfully integrates authentic listening materials in both varieties, we sent a questionnaire and set up an experiment in which respondents were asked to rate the intelligibility of audio fragments in “higher” and “lower” standard varieties of Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch. 42 masters students of Dutch in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland participated in the experiment and filled in the questionnaire. The vast majority of respondents found it very important to work with authentic materials in both national varieties. A higher proportion of respondents gave top priority (maximum score 5) to improving listening skills than to writing skills (76,2% to 61%), suggesting that the former should not be neglected when developing exercises for new course materials. The results of the experiment showed only a slight difference in reported intelligibility between Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch. The difference between the scores for the audio samples representing the “lower” and “higher” standard variety were, however, statistically significant, the latter being rated higher in terms of intelligibility. This suggests that the distinction Grondelaers, Van Hout andVan Gent (2016) make between Teacher Dutch (the “lower” variety) and Neutral Standard Dutch (the “higher variety”) is a relevant one and should be taken into account when selecting authentic material for the target group mentioned. |
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