engleski

Does preschool support multilingualism? – an example of Croatia

The Republic of Croatia is perceived as a monolingual country with over 95% of its inhabitants being the native speakers of the Croatian language. However, that perception is rather deceptive, since on the local level (in counties, municipalities and cities), the language diversity is much larger (see Cvikic 2014, Jelaska & Cvikic 2012). For example, in the town of Buje Croatian is spoken as a mother tongue by 58.39% of the inhabitants, while the other 42% of Buje inhabitants speak Italian, Slovenian, Albanian or Bosnian as their L1 (www.dzs.hr). Several studies investigated the role of the school in supporting multilingualism in Croatia, either from the perspective of maintaining the minority language (Cvikic, Aladrovic Slovacek & Turza Bogdan 2013) or acquiring Croatian as L2 (Jelaska & Cvikic 2012, Turza Bogdan & Ciglar 2013, Cvikic 2014). However, there are no studies on the role of preschool in supporting and promoting multilingualism in Croatia, despite the fact that there are 27 preschools in minority languages (in Italian, Serbian, Czech and Hungarian language) and that 394 preschools in Croatia offer early foreign language learning (www.mzos.hr). This paper investigates the role of preschool education in supporting and promoting multilingualism in Croatia based on the analysis of the educational documents (i.e. National curriculum for early and preschool education), programs for preschool teacher education, previous research findings and interviews with the educators (preschool teachers and teacher students). The implication of the results to the preschool educational practice will also be discussed.

preschool education; language acquisition; multilingualism; Croatian language

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