Developing pragmatic competence in Croatian as a second and foreign language

Sažetak: The development of pragmatic competence is of great importance in the teaching of a foreign language because in addition to language and sociolinguistic competence, it constitutes communication competence (CEFRL 2005: 111; Jelaska 2005: 21), and its underdevelopment causes misunderstandings that have a negative impact on communication. Pragmatic competence in Croatian as a second and foreign language (CL2) is described on the B1 and B2 levels of language competence under the CEFRL (Nazalević Čučević 2013; Nazalević Čučević 2015), but there have been no studies that would provide guidelines for the teaching of pragmatic content in the classes of CL2. For that reason, a study was conducted among teachers of CL2, investigating their experience in teaching pragmatic content to different types of learners of CL2 and their own practices in forms of address, which were selected as prototypical pragmatic content taught in foreign language classes from the very beginning. The study results have demonstrated that pragmatic content is very heterogeneous and that its selection depends not only on the language and the situation, but also on the characteristics of communication participants and their relationships, which renders their teaching more complex. The study has also shown that different groups of learners of CL2 require a different approach to teaching pragmatic content, depending on the context in which the teaching takes place. Speakers of closely related Slavic languages have proven to be a specific group of learners of CL2, having pragmatic competence that is generally not as developed as the language one, and this difference should be overcome by carefully structured teaching.