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Project

 SABeD: The development of a Spoken Academic Belgian Dutch Corpus

Lectures are a typical mode of discourse of higher education. In these lectures, students are faced with new content offered to them in an unfamiliar and specific language register: academic Dutch. Recent research (Deygers, 2017; Deygers, Van den Branden, & Peters, 2017) has shown that Dutch-as-a-Foreign-Language learners at university struggle with academic spoken Dutch in lectures, even though they passed the university entrance language tests. The aim of the present project is (1) to compile a corpus of academic spoken Dutch in order (2) to investigate the effectiveness of speech technology to automatically transcribe spoken texts, (3) to develop a word list of academic spoken Dutch, and (4) to develop an academic spoken vocabulary test. The composition of such a corpus will help the development of learning materials and tests to better prepare native and non-native speakers for Dutch-medium higher education. This corpus will prove to be an invaluable asset for both scholars and policy makers.
Date:1 Jan 2021 →  31 Dec 2022
Keywords:corpus linguistics, academic language proficiency, vocabulary
Disciplines:Natural language processing, Corpus linguistics, Language proficiency, Dutch language, Second language learning, Language didactics