Intercultural Competence in Textbooks of Croatian as a Mother Tongue

Abstract

The development of language competences is the fundamental goal of educational documents at the world (Eight Key Competencies for Lifelong Learning, 2008; 2020), European (CEFRL, 2015) and national level Curriculum for the subject Croatian language for elementary schools and high schools (2019). This implies the development of language communication and linguistic competence. In the process of primary school language learning, it is important to develop linguistic and communicative competence, which includes sociolinguistic, strategic and pragmatic competence, but also intercultural competence. Intercultural competence is most often defined as competence in which knowledge of elements of different cultures that are in contact with the dominant culture is developed or the child gets to know them through different contents in order to understand the world in which he lives. In Croatian language classes, the child most often encounters this competence through various texts that are written from the perspective of another culture or talk about different cultures that live in the Republic of Croatia, as well as outside it. Thus, a child will, for example, learn something about the eating habits of the British if he reads E. Blyton's novels Five Friends and the like. Therefore, the goal of this research is to analyze textbooks and reading books for the teaching of the Croatian language from the third to the sixth grade and to find elements of intercultural competence in the texts through qualitative analysis. It is expected that crosscultural elements will most often be found in the starting texts and that most of the texts will belong to the Anglo-Saxon linguistic and cultural area.