Interkulturalno čitanje kratke priče "Kineski jastog" britanske spisateljice A.S.Byatt

The authors argue that the literary text, which has tended to be neglected in the language classroom largely as a result of adherence to structuralist guidelines, offers rich grounds for use in a university language course. The authors discuss different approaches to using a literary text, in this case The Chinese Lobster by A.S.Byatt, including lexical and discourse analysis, both of which need to be viewed through the prism of culture in order to help deal with problems of interculturality that inevitably arise in the language classroom

Attitudes to Writing and Writing Behavior

The paper describes a study carried out with university English majors to gain an insight into students’ attitudes to writing and into their writing behavior, and to provide a starting point for developing a writing curriculum. A questionnaire was designed to elicit data from a sample comprising over 200 students. In addition, interviews were carried out with a subsample (N=30) and their written work was continually assessed over a period of three months. The findings suggest that students overall consider their writing skills lacking in many aspects and would find a college course that would help them develop and perfect academic writing very helpful. Although the participants were quite proficient in English, most found writing in English a very daunting task which required dealing with the cognitively complex process of writing and at the same time focusing on articulating meaning in a linguistically acceptable form. The data shows that students can, to some degree, identify problems they have in writing but they are not prepared to deal with them. A well-thought out curriculum which approached writing as a recursive process and was based on a student-centered pedagogy would create a more fruitful writing environment and raise students’ motivation, thus facilitating the development of a very important and possibly the most complex skill not only in L2 but in L1 as well

Razvijanje vještina pisanja na naprednom stupnju: šest studija slučaja

The paper focuses on the writing skills of advanced learners of English as a foreign language. The attitudes towards different aspects of compositions, the writing strategies that learners use in composition writing and the compositions witten by three good and three poor writers are looked into. The analyses carried out in the study point to the easily discernible differences in the quality of good and poor compositions and the difficulties of determining the causes of these differences