engleski

DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE IN THE PROCESS OF MASTERING CROATIAN STANDARD LANGUAGE IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

The basic aim and purpose of teaching Croatian as an official language in the Republic of Croatia in the primary school is to develop language skills. Croatian language is the most comprehensive subject in primary education because pupils learn it from the first to the sixth grade nearly every day (5 hours per week). Pupils, therefore, read, write and speak in Croatian language.To make that process of mastering simpler and closer to pupils, language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing are implented in language teaching. However, research shows that pupils in elementary school have a very negative attitude towards the Croatian language as a school subject and very often have "fear of the language". It is often manifested through students being insecure in the functional use of language. In fact, that is the main problem. In Croatian schools, the emphasis is placed on learning language theories or knowledge of the language, while much less time is devoted to the application of theoretical principles and regulations. That is the reason why language (linguistic) competence is much more developed than communicative competence to pupils in Croatian elementary school. Language (linguistic) competence involves knowledge of the language while communicative competence implies functional usage of language in everyday communication situations. Research (Pavličević-Franić, Cvikić, Jelaska, 2007, 2011) show that pupils already at a very early age of learning Croatian language learn definitions related to grammar and spelling better, while they show very weak knowledge in tasks which require applying these definitions. These results show a lack in the way of teaching. Teachers also very often use frontal teaching methods and explanatory forms of teaching Croatian language instead of communication-functional approach. That way, the teacher is in the center while in the communication-functional approach pupil is in the center. In its document Eight key competences for lifelong learning (2005) the European Commission emphasizes the importance of developing communicative competence in the mother tongue as the first and key competence because better knowledge of the mother tongue will influence on better and faster mastering of a foreign language and other educational contents. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the linguistic competence of elementary school pupils from the second to the eighth grade. The pupils will be offered a test of linguistic competence and a test of communicative competence. Results will be compared according to pupils' age, gender, region they come from, quality of their teachers, their mark in Croatian language and attitude towards the Croatian language as the school subject. It is assumed that to students in all age groups (grades) linguistic competence will be significantly better developed than communicative competence. It is also assumed that the girls will achieve better results than boys just like pupils who come from Stokavian areas because the Croatian standard language is shaped on Stokavian dialect. It is expected that the pupils who have better grade in the Croatian language and more positive attitude will also show significantly better results in both tests. It is also expected that the attitude of pupils towards the teacher and his teaching way will greatly affect their attitude towards the subject, but also that the results of both tests will depend on that. 500 students from 10 different elementary schools belonging to various Croatian regions with different idioms will be included in the study in order to determine the impact of local idioms on mastering the standard language. It is also expected that pupils in their first educational period (from the second to sixth grades) will not achieve significantly different results in the tests because according to Piaget (1977) they are in the same stage of concrete thinking operations while the pupils in the seventh and eighth grades will achieve significantly different results (other educational period) because of the development of a new abstract way of thinking so it will be interesting to compare the overall results of the first and second periods of education. Data will be analyzed using content analysis and analysis of variance, Mann-Whitney U Test, Kolmogorov test and t-test in SPSS statistical program and will also be graphically presented.

communicative competence ; linguistic competence ; mastering of Croatian standard language ; explanatory way of teaching ; communicative-functional approach

nije evidentirano