The purpose of the present paper is the study of the interaction between learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP), in particular, English for the Financial Sector, and general English proficiency. The research examines the effects of an ESP course being taught for a year on the students' general English proficiency.Two sets of tests were prepared for that purpose and administered to 30 first-year students of finance and law. The students took the placement test twice, at the beginning and at the end of the school year. To monitor test performance over a research period, a parallel form measuring the same competences was administered at the beginning of the second semester. In the test development process a special consideration has been paid to the level of difficulty and its relation to the students' prior educational context. Drawing on the National State Matura exams the test is set at Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) Level B2. As regards its content the test is comprised of reading comprehension tasks (multiple matching, multiple-choice cloze, gapped text) and grammar tasks aiming to examine lexical and grammatical competence.There were two major assumptions in this study: 1) Learning ESP can improve students' general English proficiency, and 2) There is a more substantial improvement in lexical competence as compared to the improvement in grammatical competence.There is strong evidence in support of the first hypothesis, whereas for the second one the results were ambiguous. After major findings are presented and discussed, implications for ESP teaching are given in closing.

In accordance with the Bologna Declaration, modern languages and communication skills have a growing importance in all professions. With the prospect of Croatian membership of the EU and taking into consideration the conditions of the growing internationalization of law in general, knowledge of foreign languages represents an indispensable prerequisite for international com- munication within the legal profession. Thus, teaching foreign languages in the field of law, especially English and German, is necessary not only for the pro- fessional education of Croatian law students, but also for their mobility within the network of European universities. This paper presents a case-study of the current situation in teaching Legal English and Legal German in Croatian Law Schools. First, the status of foreign languages for specific purposes (FLSP) in the Higher Education System of the Republic of Croatia in general is analyzed. The main part of the paper is dedicated to teaching Legal English and / or Legal German as compulsory courses within the curricula of Croatian law faculties (status, syllabus design, teaching methods). Then some projects on teaching foreign languages to practicing lawyers will be presented. With the prospect of Croatian membership of the EU, specific education programmes for lawyer- linguists have been introduced by the Law Faculties of Zagreb and Osijek. These programmes, developed within the lifelong education project for lawyers, offer an opportunity for Croatian law students and young lawyers not only to im- prove their knowledge of Legal English and Legal German, but also to learn other languages of the EU, like French or Italian. These new programmes are the response of Croatian foreign language teachers to the current requirements of the European labour market and the challenges of the internationalization of the modern world.

INTRODUCTIONThe main focus of this paper is to examine the intensity of students' intrinsic and/or extrinsic learning motivation, as well as how this is related to their socio-demographic characteristics. As an innate human quality, and a central psychological concepts, motivation has been studied in many scientific disciplines, from many different perspectives: psychological, sociological and social-psychological, among others. Self-determination theory (Deci/Ryan 2000a: 68) explains human motivation and personality using traditional empirical methods, and focusing on human resources for the development of personality and behaviour regulation. A motivated person is characterized by the possession of energy, a strong interest in taking action, goal orientation and perseverance. By contrast, a person lacking inspiration and impetus to act is considered unmotivated. The types of factors that motivate a person to undertake an activity are extremely diverse. People can be motivated because they value the activity they are undertaking very highly, or because there is a strong external coercion. Students can be motivated to learn because of their inherent curiosity and interest in acquiring knowledge, or for external reasons, such as achieving good grades or positive feedback (approval) from their parents. Based on these different reasons and/or goals, self-determination theory (hereafter referred to as SDT) distinguishes between two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic (Deci/Ryan 2000: 54).To further explain extrinsic motivation and environmental factors, Deci and Ryan (2000: 61) introduced, alongside self-determination theory, another sub-theory, referred to as organismic integration theory. According to this theory, on the far left of the self-determination continuum (Figure 1) is amotivation, the state in which there is no interest in pursuing an activity, and at the far right end there is intrinsic motivation, which is characterised by a high degree of autonomy and intrinsic regulation. Extrinsic motivation, categorised by the degree of autonomy, is situated on the continuum between amotivation and intrinsic motivation.

Terminological collocations1 are one of the most typical and very frequent units of representation of concepts in many disciplines. Although traditionally considered to be unwelcome in terminology, synonymy is amply present in specialized languages. Consequently, the same phenomenon is reflected in terminological collocations. This paper aims to investigate synonymous collocations extracted from mechanical engineering texts in terms of the most frequent and relevant types of denominative variation in the selected English collocations as well as of their equivalents in German and Croatian. The analysis of variations in terminological collocations gives insight into the (non)substitutability of collocation constituents as one of the major characteristics of collocations. Extracted collocations are analysed within a two-tier framework structured at a paradigmatic and a syntagmatic level, which allows for the identification of the three types of term variation: morphological, syntagmatic and semantic. Focusing on the collocations with the structure noun + noun and adjective + noun the results show that constituents of both syntactic structures allow substitution. The denominative variants are prevalent in adjective + noun collocations in which synonymous lexical elements functioning as collocates do not entail a concept change (admissible load ↔ allowable load). Lexeme substitutions are also annotated in noun + noun collocations expressing a slightly different dimension or facet of the concept (face gear vs. crown gear vs. crown wheel). The majority of German equivalents are nominal compounds that outnumber their morphological variants offering multiple equivalences.

This study explores collocations in mechanical engineering texts by applying a multilingual contrastive analysis approach. The point of departure in the contrastive analysis is the morpho-syntactic properties and the lexical realization of the semantic level, viewing a collocation as a unit of meaning and as an equivalent or translation unit. British contextualism (Firth, Sinclair) and lexicological approaches (Hausmann, Cowie) were adopted as two major theoretical approaches, but, considering various distributional, semantic, conceptual, and pragmatic aspects of collocations, further theoretical approaches were needed that draw on theories of lexical semantics and corpus and computational linguistics methods. In this study, collocation is understood as a typical combination of mainly two words characterized by habitualness, high frequency of co-occurrence of its constituents, and their specific semantic hierarchical relationship (Hausmann, 1984, 1995). The aim of the study is to describe the specific properties of nominal collocations identified in the English sub-corpus (adjective + noun, noun + noun), to compare them with their equivalents in German and Croatian, and to highlight the most significant features of this sample as well as the observed universals. Applying a corpus-based two-tier methodological model, collocations were extracted from the English sub-corpus, serving as a starting sub-corpus, by use of the computer software AntConc, in particular the Cluster/N-Grams function and the concordance tool (Anthony, Windows 3.5.0.). Once a frequency-sorted list was created from each monolingual sub-corpus, a list of collocation candidates was created by applying a frequency threshold of 5, which provided data for the fine-grained quantitative and qualitative analysis. To describe the relationship of collocation constituents and to clarify the creation of meaning by their cooccurrence in a syntagmatic sequence as well as by the interdependence of their meanings (‘meaning by collocation’, Firth, 1957), typical association measures, popular in computational linguistics, were used (the mutual information, the t-score, the chi-square test, the loglikelihood ratios, and P). The comparison of the morpho-syntactic properties and semantic relations of identified equivalent collocations in German and Croatian revealed five different structural patterns, and a very high level of full lexical correspondence. The adjective + noun collocation pattern is found to be a multilingual equivalent, whereas nominal compounds proved to be an exclusive feature of German, and noun + prepositional phrase pattern of Croatian. The common matching pattern of German and Croatian is noun + genitive noun. According to these findings, the structural collocation patterns in the German and Croatian languages depend on the language type and the possibilities allowed by word formation processes. Since the subject of the research is LSP collocations, their terminological status, role in the hierarchical structure of taxonomies and the relationship of equivalence in a contrastive terminological analysis were also concerns of interest here. Phenomena observed by contrasting them within the multilevel framework were presented systematically and constituted the basis for the derivation of universals by inductive reasoning. The findings of the empirically collected data analysis confirmed the proposed four hypotheses. In the semantic relation established by the realization of collocation constituents’ meaning potential, the collocate generates the specialization of the base meaning by actualizing one of its meanings, and at the same time contributes to the semantic transparency of the collocation. Given the intra-collocational cohesion, and (non)substitutability of collocation constituents as one of the major features of collocations, the substitution of components is possible only with synonymous lexemes retaining the semantic value of the collocation. Variants of terminological collocations were confirmed in all three sub-corpora exhibiting remarkable typological diversity and uneven representation. Furthermore, an important distinctive feature established cross-linguistically is the prevalence of nominal compounds in German as equivalents of English collocations demonstrating high equivalency at the lexical, semantic, conceptual, and functional levels.