Dublin Core
Title
Language Learning as a Space for Understanding Oneself and the Other
Abstract
For a long period of time, an imperative of acquiring cross-cultural competence has been the most important thing in the contemporary approach to language teaching. In the process of SLA students’ knowledge and experience is being put in the foreground and during the process of learning they are activated and stimulated so students could be able to acquire additional skills. Here linguistic competence becomes both - the aim and the mean that enables the growth of general communication skills. All above mentioned occurs at Croaticum - The Center for Croatian as L2 in Zagreb where the members of different cultures have been learning Croatian for 50 years. Courses are held in extremely heterogeneous groups and the students are not just getting the knowledge on the culture of the Croats whose language is being thought, but the teacher and students are exposed to the intensive process of becoming aware of the differences among the “Others”. The last is especially emphasized in the groups with the large number of Third World asylum seekers whose specific perception of reality is burdened with their own traumatic experience (loss of all family members, gender discrimination and abuse etc) and thus have effect on topics chosen for their courses, as well as to the approach of language methods that will be used. Techniques and approaches that lecturers use in the work of Croaticum in order to develop their own, as well as students’ cross-cultural competence, will be shown in this presentation. The focus will also be at information exchange among students, pairs or groups. Furthermore, it will be shown how the game, well argumented discussion and projective teaching can serve not only as a way of acquiring language knowledge, but as a space of scenery didactics where the process of cross-cultural learning is being held
Keywords
Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed
PeerReviewed
Date
2012-05
Extent
878