engleski

Teaching of Croatian as a Second Language to Young Learners: Current State and Future Perspectives

The Croatian language is spoken by 5.5 million people: 4.4 million Croatian inhabitants and over a million speakers that live abroad. For some of them Croatian is a second language. Since the number of non-native speakers of Croatian (in Croatia) is relatively small, Croatia is considered to be a monolingual country. Despite the fact that Croatian is a non-native language to some primary school children in Croatia, for years it has been taught as a first language to all of the students. Because of this and various other reasons (social, cultural, political, etc.) certain types of bilingualism are typical for the communities of particular first language (Italian, Hungarian, Roma, etc). Hence, within the borders of Croatia various groups of bilingual speakers can be differentiated: from balanced bilinguals to speakers of Croatian with very limited proficiency. The situation with the Croatian language in foreign countries is even more complicated due to its psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic status. The possibilities of institutional learning differ in different countries and certainly influence the proficiency level of Croatian speakers. In this paper, different types of young Croatian L2 learners will be discussed, both inside and outside of Croatia. In past several years the acquisition of Croatian as L2 by children speakers of Roma, Hungarian and German language was investigated (i. e. Jelaska, Dobravac, 2003 ; Cvikic, Kuvac, 2003 ; Kuvac, Cvikic, 2004, Cvikic, Kuvac, Dobravac, 2004). The differences in proficiency of different groups of Croatian language learners will be shown. All the differences will be investigated according to the relevant factors that can influence it, including type, length and amount of language instruction. Significant changes in Croatian language curriculum, teaching approaches and teacher training will be proposed.

Croatian as L2; young learners; Roma L1; Hungarian L1; morphology

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