Vocational education (mbo) prepares students for various professional practices. Language plays an important role in this. Students need language to express themselves and to communicate with colleagues, supervisors and customers. Dutch is therefore a compulsory subject in vocational education, for which proficiency requirements (‘reference levels’) are set. Students must in any case master the standard language, but education must also take into account linguistic diversity. Students should be aware of different languages and language registers. Other languages or language varieties can be just as important, or even more effective: people often use a more informal variant of Dutch among colleagues, and dementia patients may feel more comfortable hearing the language they grew up with. Every language form can be useful, and no language form is necessarily the best in all circumstances. How do we deal with this?
The knowledge that scholars in the linguistics field have acquired about language variation in recent decades can help vocational students with this, but such knowledge is currently lacking in vocational education. In general, “science” is something that is very distant for the average vocational student. By participating in research themselves, students learn to think about language in a rational way and not just in terms of right and wrong. At the same time, they learn that science also affects their own lives.
In this project, we propose to introduce vocational students to sociolinguistics through citizen science. Because the students play an active role, formulate scientific questions themselves and collect data, they become familiar with how science works: you learn more by doing than by passively acquiring knowledge. Citizen science projects often do not go much further than the “citizen” participants collecting data. We want to go a step further: with the help of researchers, the vocational students will set up small experiments themselves as part of their Dutch language course. The idea is that there is no better way to learn what science is and means than by actively participating in a subject that is relevant to you and can help you in your professional development.
In concrete terms, this means that vocational students, assisted by university (Master's) students, set up short experiments in their Dutch language classes, as is customary in linguistics. Vocational students record spoken fragments in which they vary their language use (formal, informal, jargon, word choice, dialect, etc.) and within a specific context (talking to customers, job interviews, colleagues, supervisors). They then ask their classmates, family and friends to assess the audio clips on a number of dimensions. How would the speaker come across to the customer? How are the different speakers assessed? Students collect and analyse data together under supervision, interpret the results and draw conclusions.
