The development of intercultural competence is increasingly being perceived as a key goal in today’s education. As a result of a strong emphasis on that competence in curricular documents, teachers are faced with demanding tasks. Confirming this, recent research in the field of intercultural competence in Croatian schools indicates the numerous difficultiesteachers face in accomplishing the goal of developing their pupils’ intercultural competence. Teacher professional development can be crucial for a systematic approach to the development of learners’ intercultural competence. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine whether teacher participation in a further professional development programme on the topic of intercultural competence can significantly affect the achievement of goals set in the current curricular documents on foreign language learning related to intercultural competence. The effects of the professionaldevelopment programme were assessed by means of analysing learner outcomes in intercultural competence prior to and after teacher participation in the programme. A quasi-experimental pre-test-post-test design was used, and the achievements of 752 primary and lower secondary level pupils attending 4th and 8th grades were evaluated. The results confirmed that foreign language teacher professional development in the field of intercultural competence had positive effects on pupils’ learning outcomes, especially in the cognitive component of intercultural competence. This leads to the conclusion that it is necessary to motivate foreign language teachers to participate in such programmes. The results also indicate the necessity of placing particular emphasis on the problem of stereotypes and prejudices when designing such programmes.

The paper addresses the development of multilingual awareness of students in the fifth grade of primary school within the following language constellation L3 German after L2 English and L3 English after L2 German. The research focuses on two issues relating to the students’ ability to notice and verbalize cross-linguistic links in L3 – L2 – L1 systems. The research established that participants recognize, to a high degree, cross-lingual connections of the second foreign language (L3) with the first foreign language (L2) and the mother tongue (L1), and that the majority of students are able to verbalize them. What is more, a positive correlation has been established between noticing and explaining cross-lingual connections. The results show that 11-year-old students have the potential to develop elements of cross-linguistic and metalinguistic awareness based on which they can be exposed to systematic input directed towards developing multilingual awareness. Placing that finding in the context of previous research findings about the positive connectedness of the level of language awareness of multilinguals and their language competence, the paper discusses the need for introducing structured development of multilingual awareness into teaching third languages in primary school.   Key words: cross-linguistic awareness; metalinguistic awareness; primary language education; plurilingual competence; third language acquisition