engleski

Intercultural Awareness of Croatian Teenage Foreign Language Learners

In today's world characterized by intense economic and cultural ties, global reach of the media and communication networks into all spheres of life, interculturalism has become a sine qua non of education of each individual regardless of their national, religious, linguistic and cultural identity. The European Union is aware of the effects of migration, population growth and foreign communities on multi-ethnic and multicultural character of European societies and inevitably tends to develop intercultural dialogue, especially when teaching foreign languages, because within foreign language teaching one can very easily mediate cultural knowledge and adopt positive attitudes towards Other cultures, and Others who are different, while at the same time not losing the local or regional identity of an individual. Therfore, a need, awareness and motivation for implementing interculturalism, is present, but it has been observed that in some countries not enough attention is given to this issue during education . For this reason, the authors of this paper are doing research into the concept of interculturalism among Croatian teenagers with the aim of finding out their intercultural awareness and attitudes, detecting shortcomings and proposing improvements. Two main reasons can be given for the importance of intercultral awareness in Croatia: coexistence of people of different nations (with Roma being culturally particularly different) and the desire of many young people to go to the other EU countries. For this purpose, a survey will be conducted among 300 teenage students learning English and German. The starting hypothesis is that regardless of the great significance of this concept it has not yet been sufficently devloped among Croatian teenage students so that a considerable percentage of them will demonstrate lack of cross-cultural knowledge as well as negative attitudes toward members of other cultures.

Interculturalism; Intercultural Awareness; Croatian Teenage Foreign Language Learners; German; English; lack of cross-cultural knowledge; negative attitudes

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