Elements of the foundation of foreign language teaching policies in bih (culture and cultural diversity)

Abstract

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a multiethnic and multicultural society in which, traditionally, there is a high degree of sensitivity to the need to respect, promote, get to know, connect and preserve different cultures. This paper primarily tries to point to the multifaceted cultural identity of BiH and the fact that cultural, traditional and religious diversities and civilizational permeations with elements of European and Oriental-Islamic culture have had a strong influence on planning the policy of teaching foreign languages in this country for centuries. By enduring strong political and cultural influences of East and West, Bosnia and Herzegovina, with contemporary designed curricula in primary and some secondary schools, has opened the possibility of combined teaching of European and oriental languages for the last ten years. The main goal is that students from an early school age face cultures of completely different climates and, by bringing such cultures to correlation with each other and to the correlation with the native culture, to learn tolerance, understanding and appreciation of what is strange and different. The paper also deals with the close relationship of a foreign language and culture of the people who use it and points to the necessity of the language acquisition through teaching elements of the foreign culture, and this method introduces students to the process of intercultural learning of the foreign language and positively influence the development of their cultural communicative competences. BiH has strong intentions to make foreign language curricula fully compliant with modern European concepts in the teaching and learning foreign languages. Keywords: cultural diversity, the policy of learning foreign languages, culture, curricula, interaction, tolerance