PREPOSITIONS IN TEACHING SERBIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (APPLICATION OF THINK-ALOUD PROTOCOL)

Abstract

The paper analyzes prepositions in teaching Serbian as a foreign language on data collected using the think-aloud protocol. The acquisition of prepositions in teaching of foreign languages is accompanied by numerous difficulties, which is also the case in teaching Serbian as a foreign language. Some of the reasons for this are their polysemy, frequency, but also insufficient attention to these linguistic units. That is why these units are often one of the last to be adopted when learning a foreign language. Our research included three students of Serbian as a foreign language course at intermediate level 1 – B1 of learning, at the International Summer School of Serbian Language, Culture and History at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad. The research was conducted in two rounds – at the beginning of the School, and after students completed it and passed the B1 level exam. The participants filled in the blanks in the given sentences by writing the appropriate proposition, while thinking aloud, i.e. verbalizing everything that was going through their minds while solving the tasks, which was also recorded. The corpus of the research, therefore, were the tasks that the participants did and the recordings that were collected. The aim of the research was to determine to what extent errors occur in the use of prepositions among foreign students, what possible causes of their occurrence are, and what criteria students use when choosing the appropriate preposition. Research has shown that students use different criteria when choosing a suitable preposition, the most common of which are: the case form that follows it, how the example sounds, whether they know the example, the verb’s rection, etc.