No abstract

This paper examines designing language teaching materials as an integral segment of language courses taught at tertiary level. Firstly, it defines teaching materials and considers them both as anything that can be used to facilitate the language learning and as authentic materials specially designed for development of specific skills. Secondly, it discusses reasons for designing materials as supplement to the materials teachers are provided with. Thirdly, the authors attempt to present the advantages of the process of producing materials. Material designing enables teachers to have a control over selection of topic, situations, functions and skills to be developed. Moreover, it takes into account particular learning environment, students' learning needs and their learning experiences, cross-cultural issues and their influence on development of students' communication competence. This is followed by a comparison of experiences in material designing at two faculties,

Since the introduction of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach, the use of the mother tongue (L1) in second language teaching and learning has been minimized, if not entirely excluded. However, scholarly interest in the question of the importance of L1 has recently been renewed. In light of this, the aim of this paper is to examine how often university students use Serbian as their L1 in learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP), as well as how they perceive their teachers' use of L1. A total of 146 students participated in the research conducted by means of a questionnaire exploring their practice and beliefs regarding L1. Additionally, structured interviews were conducted with 12 students. Answers obtained through the questionnaire were analyzed by means of the Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests, while content analysis was employed for the analysis of the interview responses. Statistically significant differences were found with respect to the year and field of study, the length of time the students had been learning English, and the level of their language proficiency. The interview responses showed that the students employ L1 in both classroom and individual learning and that their ESP teachers also use it as a scaffolding technique or for teaching terminological standardization and contrastive analysis.

Udžbenik ima posebnu ulogu u nastavi stranog jezika. On je ne samo korisna osnova za držanje kursa već je i orijentir kako za predavača tako i za studente. Međutim, pored mnogobrojnih prednosti, korišćenje udžbenika kao jedinog nastavnog sredstva ima i svoje ozbiljne nedostatke koji su predočeni u ovom radu. Iz tog razloga često je neophodno prilagoditi udžbenik konkretnom kursu i potrebama studenata, posebno za kurseve sa posebnim profesionalnim namenama. Prilagođavanje udžbenika je složen proces koji obuhvata prilagođavanje na nivou aktivnosti, lekcije i silabusa. Posebno je važno uključivanje studenata u ovaj proces kako bi i predavači i sudenti bili zadovoljni rezultatom.

E-mail correspondence between teachers and students is common. Online communication provides students with possibilities to write to teachers directly, using a diverse level of knowledge, level of ignorance and personal beliefs. The aim of this paper is to answer whether culture and cultural dimensions (defined by Hofstede’s high and low Power Distance dimension) influence the professional correspondence between teachers and students. The small-scale corpus consists of 100 e-mails, 50 written by Slovene students in English or Slovene, and 50 by Serbian students in Serbian or English. The research investigates the choice of e-mail template, the choice of language (native tongue or language of instructions), and the norms related to politeness and power distance, with the focus on salutations, formality, polite expressions, and directness. Usage of lexical modifiers, such as downtoners, upstaters and hedges will also be investigated. The results will demonstrate that e-mails by Slovene students follow new cultural standards and have become more indirect and informal, while Serbian students write e-mails with formal salutations and direct requests following the inherited hierarchy and still unmodified cultural dimensions.