Dutch: Advanced Language Skills and Fluency II

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :

• follow extended speech even when it is not clearly structured and when relationships are only implied and not signalled explicitly;
• understand standard spoken language, live or broadcast;
• easily follow complex interactions between third parties in group discussion and debate, even on abstract, complex unfamiliar topics;
• understand spoken language displaying light regional varieties;
• easily summarize lectures, conferences and talks (even on specialized topics) presented by native speakers;
• understand a wide range of journalistic, literary or domain-specific texts;
• appreciate stylistic differences between texts (written or spoken);
• discover the structure of discourse;
• recognize stylistic devices typical of the target language and provide equivalents in his/her mother tongue;
• identify the targeted readership of a text;
• have a good command of a broad lexical repertoire allowing gaps to be readily overcome with circumlocutions and avoidance strategies;
• have a good command of idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms;
• make no significant vocabulary errors;
• consistently maintain a high degree of grammatical accuracy; errors are rare;
• be able to vary intonation and place sentence stress correctly in order to express finer shades of meaning;
• use consistent and accurate layout, paragraphing, spelling and punctuation;
•  produce clear, smoothly flowing, well-structured speech, showing controlled use of organizational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.