Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
most readily. Only 20% of the corpus dealt with cultures based on professional,
gender, or age social groups or popular subcultures. National cultures dealt with
most frequently were the British, American and Serbian ones, which can be interpreted
as an indication that students felt the most comfortable and competent
dealing, apart from their native culture, with the cultures they had got well-acquainted
with through their studies. Only 15% of the corpus referred to other
cultures, English-speaking ones, such as Canadian or Australian, or some other
European or regional cultures.
Another general observation was that the papers included both the ‘inside’
and the ‘outside’ perspectives in looking at particular cultures – how a cultural
group sees itself, and how others see the cultural group. We interpret this fact as
a sign of students’ intercultural awareness, that is, an awareness of the fact that
in intercultural communication both self-image and the ability to take different
perspectives play an important role.
With respect to our first research question, the analysis singled out five
broad thematic categories that emerged in students’ written work, and a number
of more specific concepts within each of these. The thematic categories included,
in the order of their frequency in the corpus: (1) stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination
(49%); (2) subcultures (31%); (3) cultural profiles, cultural differences
and culture shock (11%); (4) language varieties and language attitudes (5%);
and (5) globalization (4%). It is important to point out that we relied on the quantitative
analysis mainly in the identification of themes and concepts, while the
interpretation was based on qualitative, rather than quantitative criteria. This is
because we believe that in the context of this study it is questionable whether the
frequency of occurrence of a certain theme or concept should be interpreted only
as a sign of importance assigned to it or the focus of students’ interest, because
students’ choices may have been influenced by other factors, too. Namely, some
topics were more complex and more difficult to deal with than the others, and students’
choices may have been guided by the difficulty of the task, the availability
of materials for analysis, or their concerns about the final grade for the course, as
much as by their interests and the relevance attributed to a certain concept. That is
why we refrained from invariably interpreting the lower frequency of occurrence
of a topic as an indicator of a lack of awareness, interest or understanding on the
students’ part.
Within the thematic category of stereotypes, three sub-categories of themes
were identified, based on the type of stereotypes and the general perspective.
First, the most frequent were national, ethnic, and regional stereotypes.
However, the analysis of the contexts in which the theme of national stereotypes
occurred revealed that it was observed from different perspectives, which we
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