Govor, Vol. 39 No. 1, 2022.
Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.22210/govor.2022.39.03
Success rate at learning standard Croatian accentuation by the 8th grade primary school students
Maja Colnago
orcid.org/0000-0002-6263-3351
; Primary School Ante Starčević, Zagreb, Croatia
Elenmari Pletikos Olof
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The accentual norm is the most difficult part of Croatian standard language. The main reason is the difference in accents among Croatian dialects, some dialects have pitch-accent system while other have stress-accent system. Furthermore, the stratification of standard Croatian includes high and neutral language variety with both grammatical and lexical differences. The aim of this paper is to explore the success rate of learning standard accentuation by the eighth grade primary school students from Zagreb. Accentuation in Zagreb vernacular belongs to the stress-accent system and differs a lot from the accentuation in the high variety of the Croatian
standard, which belongs to the pitch-accent system. The students belonged to two groups: the
experimental group (N=53) with students who were additionally trained standard Croatian accent system during the entire school year and the control group (N=29) who did not receive
any additional training except for the two hours that are part of the curriculum. Reading samples of an accentually unmarked text were collected both at the beginning and at the end
of the school year. Auditory assessment by the authors was used to mark the accents produced by the students. Stressed syllable in the target words was assessed and marked. The results show that the experimental group improved their accentuation accuracy by 23% (the initial result was 42%, and the final result was 65%). Accent accuracy decreased by 3% in the control group (the initial result was 37% and the final result was 34% of correctly stressed words). The results follow the findings from the previous studies on the effects of training standard accentuation, i.e. of the progress that can be achieved through teaching and accentuation exercises during a single school year. However, the results also show the limitations of one-year teaching; showing that Zagreb students who were taught the standard accent system did not succeed completely in producing target word with high variety accents in Croatian standard.
Keywords
accentuation; accent; Croatian; Zagreb vernacular; accent teaching
Hrčak ID:
284705
URI
Publication date:
25.10.2022.
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