Elementary school accents

Gusak Bilić, Ivana. (2015). Elementary school accents. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Croatian Language and Literature. [mentor Alerić, Marko and Vlašić Duić, Jelena].

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Abstract

Elementary school accents is a methods-based study analysing the curricular Accents unit. The unit is studied from different perspectives: documents (National curriculum and Teaching plan and program for elementary schools), handbooks (Hrvatska krijesnica 7, Riječi hrvatske 7, Volimo hrvatski 7 and Hrvatski jezik 7), teachers and pupils. The focus was on the content of documents and handbooks, along with their auxiliary documents (workbooks and teacher’s guidelines), while the teachers answered a survey and the pupils a knowledge test. The research goals were: (1) to determine to what degree standard speech should be represented in class according to the documents, especially in comparison to the orthography and grammar knowledge which is expected from students; (2) to check if the handbooks are in accordance with the documents and which understanding of Croatian language accents is presented to pupils; (3) to explore to which degree standard speech is represented in Croatian language class and what is the general attitude of Croatian language teachers towards the Accents unit; (4) to check the relationship between theory and practice, especially between pupils who were taught the unit and those who were not. The results are presented in a descriptive manner and analysed with non-parametric statistical tests. They can be summarised as follows: (1) oral and written communication are the primary concern of the pedagogical and educational process and pupils are expected to recognise and implement the proper use of accents when speaking and reading; (2) handbooks are based on the documents but the displayed knowledge is partially overlapping; (3) standard speech is not equally represented in Croatian language class which reflects the attitude of teachers; (4) pupils in the control and target group have a negative score in the knowledge test and the difference between the groups is not statistically significant.

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