Abstract
The chapter aims at describing and comparing the character of vowel reduction in Czech and British English. The L1 interference plays a crucial role as the sound system of standard Czech does not contain schwa and the vowels in stressed and unstressed positions have similar manifestations.
On the contrary, in standard British the vowel reduction in the shape of mid central neutral vowel schwa greatly helps create contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables on both the word and sentence level. The goal of the research part was firstly to explore the ability of Czech users of English to reduce in unstressed positions, secondly to map the acoustic features of Czech English schwa and lastly to interpret the findings within the Czech educational context.