Croatian Studies Review, Vol. 6 No. 1, 2010.
Original scientific paper
Culture in lecturing of Croatian as a foreign language
Dinka Pasini
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Zagreb
Abstract
The Croatian language, although a so called small language, contains a huge cultural potential.
It means that there is a possibility for opening towards other cultures and indirectly towards world
languages.
In other words, a language as a closed and static system of grammatical structures with its
cultural inheritance becomes an open dynamic system orientated towards the world knowledge
market.
Culture as such in fact contains and transfers cultural values of a language, in this case
Croatian language, and builds its cultural identity.
This idea inspired the teaching of foreign languages and this article Croatian as a second and
foreign language as well.
Today, when philology studies grow into cultural studies, the culture lecturing deserves a
special importance as a part of teaching Croatian as a foreign language. In teaching Croatian
language, the lecturers present and the users of programs on universities abroad get the patterns
of Croatian culture and the picture of Croats and Croatia.
Good knowledge of culture in the main condition for outgrowing cultural stereotypes and fulfills
the main goal in modern foreign language teaching methodic – interculturality.
Empiric research done on the universities abroad shows that cultural competence of program
users croatics and slavistics students) does not follow their language competence, but it is minor
to it. By questioning the sample of hundred students, who are, according to their knowledge on
the highest level of language competence (C1 according to the Common European Referent
Framework for Languages), we got the results which show that their knowledge of Croatian culture
it an adequate and it is based on cultural stereotypes of Croats and Croatia.
Foreign students who are studying Croatian language at the universities abroad have the
perception of Croatia as a small tourist country on the mountains of Balkans (i.e. primitive, with
no culture). For them it is a country of natural beauties, folklore and folk music, where there was
a war, catholic country, the country of successful sportsmen, divided between nationalism and
Yugoslavian nostalgia. The Croatian cultural identity is not recognizable.
There are many reasons for this situation in practice, but only a few of them define the
nonexistence of unambiguous definition of culture, moving the borders between so called elite
and popular culture, the complexity of Croatian cultural identity, not adequate competence of the
lecturers teaching Croatian culture abroad, nonexistence of systematical methodic of Croatian as
a foreign and second language, the diversity of functioning of high school institutions abroad, the
teaching of wider philological slavistics programs so called Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, insufficient
number of lexicons and manuals on Croatian culture abroad etc.
To improve this situation into raise level of cultural competence on the level of language
competence, the programs of Croatian language abroad should be dedicated to the enclosure
of the Croatian culture in the teaching of Croatian language from the very beginning with the
special accent on the Croatian history in its continuity. Only such programs of Croatian language
which contain a clear concept of Croatian culture and which are performed by lecturers with an
adequate cultural competence are the guarantee for the conserving of Croatian language and its
way to interculturality in multilingual and multicultural community of European languages.
Keywords
teaching Croatian as a foreign and second language; culture in the lecturing of Croatian as a foreign language; Croatian language and culture study sections abroad; cultural stereotypes; interculturality; cultural stereotypes; cultural competences; the promotion of Croatian cultural identity on the universities abroad
Hrčak ID:
86312
URI
Publication date:
15.12.2010.
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