ĆIRILIČKO PISMO I NJEGOVE TIPOGRAFSKE VARIJANTE U NASTAVI SRPSKOG KAO STRANOG JEZIKA

Abstract

The paper analyzes the place of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet and its typographic variants in the teaching of Serbian as a foreign language, with the aim of creating a clearer picture of the potential difficulties that students can most often encounter when mastering and using it. The method of theoretical analysis with the technique of content analysis was used. The research material consisted: on the one hand, textbooks for learning the Serbian as a foreign language at all three levels - beginner, intermediate and advanced, and, on the other hand, a corpus of 30 texts (students from the USA, Russia and the People’s Republic of China) created during the academic year 2022/2023. in the Center for Serbian as a Foreign and Non-Mother Tongue at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niš. The results of the research showed us that mastering the Cyrillic alphabet is a very complex task considering: 1. the fact that students are expected to learn different typographic variants of the (very often completely unknown) Cyrillic alphabet, namely: printed and italic letters, i.e. capital letters and minuscules and 2. the existence of similarities and differences between the letters of Serbian (as a foreign language) and the student’s mother tongue. The ductus, that is, the impression that the handwriting leaves at first glance, is specific to the texts of each individual group of students. Nevertheless, certain constants and regularities can be easily observed among them. All students, regardless of their language background, first learn the way of writing those letters that they do not have in their script, that is, those whose way of writing is different from the way it is done in the Latin script, but they have difficulties with those whose forms are similar in their native language/Latin script. At the same time, the successful implementation of the process of learning the Cyrillic alphabet and its typographical variants is conditioned by the quality of textbooks, the activity of teachers and the efforts of the students themselves.