engleski

How do we create „proficient speakers of the Croatian language“? Analysis of reported communicative practices in educational settings on the islands of Vis and Korčula

In multi-national and multilingual Europe, one of the most challenging issues is the often evoked question regarding linguistic and cultural integration of immigrants into the mainstream society. The vast majority of literature on multilingualism in education, and public institutions in general, is thus focused on dealing with this vexing topic. At the same time, an often forgotten challenge concerns the treatment of different non-standard varieties of individual national languages in educational settings. Although abundant sociolinguistic evidence of patterned variation seriously questioned the widespread prescriptivist linguistic practices in education, increased transnational mobility in the European society today largely overshadowed the (meagre) efforts to provide linguistically more democratic teaching platform with regard to co-nationals speaking the 'same' language, but not all equally fluent in it. One of the examples of good practice regarding this matter is contained in the Croatian National Educational Standard (Cro. HNOS), a key document for the creation of the curriculum in formal education in Croatia. Its relevance lies in promoting a more democratic approach, which stresses the importance of dialect protection and encourages their use. It will be analyzed along with the National Curriculum – a similar document published a year later than HNOS, but epitomizing a significantly different position. The aim of the paper is to investigate the role of language policy and practice in educational setting in order to understand to what extent top-down policies and bottom-up practices intertwine and enhance multilingualism in educational settings. The analysis is based on interviews and naturally occurring spoken data collected in educational settings from the islands of Vis and Korčula, the region where a dialect considerably different from the Croatian standard variety is spoken. The data mention a number of potential problems encountered in an endeavour to sustain vertical bi- and multilingualism at schools, but the examples of good practice nonetheless indicate that those can be surmounted by taking adequate methodological approaches.

non-standard varieties; language policy in education; National Curriculum

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