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One of the fundamental goals of the Croatian language teaching of elementary school children is the mastering of communication competence that also includes the development of lexical competencies, i.e. mastering the dictionary. Also, research shows that a school-age child learns 500 to 700 new words during the year. However, research shows that the development of dictionaries is influenced by numerous linguistic but also discharging factors. Given that the adoption and learning of the language depends on cognitive abilities, equally cognitive abilities will also affect the development of a children's dictionary, that is, its width and depth. Therefore, the cognitive abilities of the students of two other grades of one primary school will be examined, and then a test of lexical competences and a productive dictionary test will be performed. The results obtained processed in the SPSS program for statistics. Children of higher cognitive abilities are expected to have a wider dictionary, that is, a better lexical density and diversity. These results compared with respect to gender, school success and parents' education. Children of educated parents showed better cognitive abilities and better lexical competence, and girls had better results on the lexical competence test compared to boys.

ltf.2024.09.02.pdf

Original Research 

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Testing cognitive abilities and vocabulary of young school-age children

Nowadays, a child's free time is more often structured after he has completed his duties in kindergarten and school. This structuring is most often organized by the parents themselves, taking into account their own children's preferences and possible shortcomings in compulsory education. Thus, children most often go to sports activities, attend music schools and foreign language schools. On the other hand, parents less often include their children in programs for the development of language abilities in their mother tongue and in the development of reading competences, even though the understanding of the content of many subjects depends on them. This is precisely why the aim of this work is to examine the attitudes of parents regarding the implementation of their children's free time and the reading habits of their family and children. One hundred and twenty parents of primary school-aged children participated in the research, filling out an online questionnaire, and the data were then processed in the SPSS program for statistics. It has been shown that more educated parents structure their children's free time more often and enroll them in foreign language schools and sports programs more often. It was also shown that the choice of leisure activities will depend more on the offer of the environment in which the child grows up than on the preferences of the child himself. It has also been shown that parents do not encourage their children to read books, except for mandatory readings, and that parents who read more will take more care of their children's reading skills.

sem.2023.13.04.pdf

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Parents’ Attitudes about Spending Free Time and Reading Habits of their Children

The development of language competences is the fundamental goal of educational documents at the world (Eight Key&nbsp;Competencies for Lifelong Learning, 2008; 2020), European (CEFRL, 2015) and national level Curriculum for the subject&nbsp;Croatian language for elementary schools and high schools (2019). This implies the development of language communication&nbsp;and linguistic competence. In the process of primary school language learning, it is important to develop&nbsp;linguistic and communicative competence, which includes sociolinguistic, strategic and pragmatic competence, but also&nbsp;intercultural competence. Intercultural competence is most often defined as competence in which knowledge of elements&nbsp;of different cultures that are in contact with the dominant culture is developed or the child gets to know them through&nbsp;different contents in order to understand the world in which he lives. In Croatian language classes, the child most often&nbsp;encounters this competence through various texts that are written from the perspective of another culture or talk about&nbsp;different cultures that live in the Republic of Croatia, as well as outside it. Thus, a child will, for example, learn something&nbsp;about the eating habits of the British if he reads E. Blyton's novels Five Friends and the like. Therefore, the goal of this&nbsp;research is to analyze textbooks and reading books for the teaching of the Croatian language from the third to the sixth&nbsp;grade and to find elements of intercultural competence in the texts through qualitative analysis. It is expected that crosscultural&nbsp;elements will most often be found in the starting texts and that most of the texts will belong to the Anglo-Saxon&nbsp;linguistic and cultural area.

sem.2022.12.04.pdf

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Intercultural Competence in Textbooks of Croatian as a Mother Tongue

The&nbsp;teacher plays a central role in every education system. In addition to&nbsp;imparting knowledge and perfecting students’ skills, the teacher is also a role&nbsp;model on a socio-emotional, moral and speech level. However, its role has&nbsp;changed throughout history and depended on culture and lifestyle. Today, the&nbsp;education system around the world is facing a major test, and thus the role of&nbsp;the teacher as the central person of this process is being tested. Namely, the&nbsp;pandemic caused by the coronavirus switched teaching to the online form in&nbsp;2020, to which some countries were less and some more ready. In the Republic of&nbsp;Croatia, distance learning was performed for three months in the first half of&nbsp;the year, and in the second half of the year, there are three models of&nbsp;teaching: distance, live and a combination of these two models. Given the experience of distance learning, on the one hand, there was less activity of&nbsp;students in completing tasks, poor understanding of the content of the&nbsp;material, the high workload of parents, but also many inconsistencies of&nbsp;teachers who in a concise time had to transfer their work entirely online (without prior education). On the other hand, it has been observed how much both&nbsp;students and parents are beginning to understand the importance of the teacher&nbsp;figure in the learning and teaching process and how difficult it is to replace&nbsp;teachers’ living word with any form of online teaching. That is why this paper&nbsp;aims to examine teachers’ attitudes about experiences with distance learning,&nbsp;and comparative analysis to determine the most common difficulties, challenges,&nbsp;and successes of this form of teaching by comparing it with classroom teaching.&nbsp;It is expected that the changes brought by distance learning will accelerate&nbsp;the digitalisation of the educational process, but also increase the&nbsp;understanding of the critical role of teachers as the centre of the educational&nbsp;process.﻿

sem.2020.07.03.pdf

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Croatian Teachers During COVID-19 Pandemic

Like&nbsp;many other areas, the educational system is challenging during the time of&nbsp;pandemic of the coronavirus. In the first half of the 2020 year, many schools&nbsp;had online lessons. The same situation was in Croatia, where we had online&nbsp;teaching from March to May in all elementary schools. Thus, the educational&nbsp;system started with fast-changing in terms of online teaching and learning&nbsp;methods. Distance learning has brought many families into specific situations&nbsp;because the help is normally provided to students by the teacher; in this&nbsp;situation, the parent had to do it. Because of that, parents were in a&nbsp;situation where they had to work online or “in vivo” and help their children&nbsp;learn new content.&nbsp;This was especially&nbsp;difficult for parents with a slightly lower level of education, parents who&nbsp;spent much time away from home at work, and especially for parents whose&nbsp;livelihoods called into question their lives, so in addition to organisational,&nbsp;some other socio-economic and emotional difficulties. Thus, this paper aims to&nbsp;research parents’ attitudes about distance learning and their role in these&nbsp;situations during the school year 2020/2021. As we expected, teachers wanted&nbsp;more cooperation with parents and parents wanted more understanding from&nbsp;teachers and not so many exercises in a short time.&nbsp;

sem.2020.08.02.pdf

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The Role of Parents during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Croatia