DO SUNCA, MESECA I ZVEZDA: NEBESKA TELA U NASTAVI SRPSKOG KAO STRANOG JEZIKA

Abstract

This article points out the use of celestial bodies in the teaching process of foreign language acquisition. Analysis includes lexicon and cultural information. The research is conducted on the textbook corpus, teaching materials, and exam and other papers of course participants at the Center for Serbian as a Foreign Language at the Faculty of Philology and Arts in Kragujevac. In order to gain insight into the degree of adoption and functional-stylistic aspects of the use of this lexicon, the corpus was completed with excerpts from the internal (informal) communication of teachers and course participants. The research conducted has shown, although the lexicon related to celestial bodies is not separated into a special thematic group and is usually not the focus of the lesson, textbooks for Serbian as a foreign language provide adequate guidelines for the teacher to explain the lexical and linguistic characteristics of the examined lexical units. By adapting teaching materials to a given group of students, the teacher expands the scope of content about celestial bodies, and the students acquire knowledge about traditional and contemporary Serbian culture (through phraseology, elements of popular and prestigious culture, etc.). By looking at the different types of production, it was determined that the participants had a good command of using these lexical units in daily communication, creative and creatively challenging forms of expression in the Serbian language. In the last part of this paper several task models are proposed which can be used in the teaching of Serbian as a foreign language to deal with this part of lexical units.