The paper examines the attitudes of secondary school students, e.
g. grammar school and craftmanship secondary school, toward their own
language competences in the native (Croatian) and foreign (English) language.
The testing instrument is a questionnaire with statements compiled according
to questionnaires used to study attitudes toward the native and / or foreign
language. The aim of the research is to observe the level of awareness of
the respondents about their own language competences. The results of the
statistical analysis indicate that the students of both populations are satisfied
with their speaking skills in both languages. They also claim to recognize their
own errors, as well as the errors and speech disfluencies of others. Grammar school students, unlike students from the craftmanship secondary school, find
the introduction of a course that would further develop speaking skills useful.
The obtained results are not in line with the dominant curricular guidelines for
teaching the native language, especially those related to the area of speaking
competences, emphasizing the need to strengthen the basic, spoken, and
consequently written competences of students. The reasons for such attitudes
could be explained by insufficient knowledge of the underlying features of
highly developed communication competence and consequently of insufficient
awareness of their own, as a necessary prerequisite for successful interaction
in the contemporary society. The research results point to the necessity of
acquiring a more objective perception of students about their own language
competences.
Keywords: speaking competences; speech errors; speech disfluency; students’
attitudes.
Developing Secondary School Students' Foreign Language Speaking Skills in the Netherlands: A Design Research Study
