Understanding learners’ epistemological beliefs as one of the core segments underlying one’s learning experience is of cardinal importance both from the point of conveying as well as acquiring new knowledge. In English language teaching studying language learning beliefs has aroused a widespread research interest, with its genesis found in the seminal paper by Horwitz (1987), whose instrument (BALLI) was employed to collect the data in the present paper. In the under-researched context of Bosnia and Herzegovina the current study explores language learning beliefs of 233 elementary school and university students, taking into account the main and interaction effect of three factors: gender, grade and educational level. Through ANOVA and MANOVA statistical analyses, the results revealed an insignificant main effect of gender and grade on the BALLI while the latter significantly affected one of the subscales. Conversely, educational level demonstrated a significant main effect on both the BALLI and one subscale. Most importantly, the study showed interesting interplay of the three factors on the shaping of learners’ stances. These findings bring a significant realization of the complexity of the beliefs as well as their ever-changing nature with relevant pedagogical implications for the field of second language acquisition.

Language learning beliefs create a considerable impact on the students' behavior, and thus greately affect the final learning outcome. Therefore, there exists a compeling need to explore learners' beliefs, and in particular to specify the stances of those more successful learners, to provide accordingly a better learning envoronment for all students. The aim of the current paper was to investigate the language learning beliefs among Bosnian university students, and to focus on the differences that exist between the groups of the participants based on their self-evaluated proficiency level. A one way ANOVA revealed no significant differences in the overall BALLI, whereas a significant difference was observed in one of the five subscales. The present study findings might be used to provide ground for the future improvement of language learning and teaching in a foreign language context similar to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Despite its importance being acknowledged in a plethora of studies, developing reading strategies appears absent from many classrooms, which justifies a considerable research interest in this topic. The present study aims to investigate how gender, nationality, and grade point average affect the frequency of the usage of different types of reading strategies among Bosnian university students. The research sample comprised 228 students studying at three universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The analysis revealed moderate to high awareness of reading strategies, the problem-solving strategies being most frequently used. A three-way ANOVA showed a significant main effect of gender as well as a significant interaction effect of Nationality × Grade Point Average on The Survey of Reading Strategies questionnaire. Moreover, a three-way MANOVA revealed that gender had a significant main effect on the combined variables, namely global, support, and problem-solving reading strategies. Similarly, the interaction effect of Nationality × Grade Point Average was significant on the three combined variables, while the interaction effects of Grade Point Average × Gender and Grade Point Average × Nationality proved significant only on the Problem-Solving subscale. The current study is expected to contribute to understanding the reading strategy use in a foreign language context, and to inspire educators to recognize the importance of their use in the classroom.

Abstract: The presence of the English language in various domains of everyday life cannot be neglected, since it is easily encountered in politics, social networks, media and newspapers worldwide, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, where especially the conditions of the post-war period contributed to the need of learning it. Even though English is widely present as a foreign language in elementary and high schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina, its acquisition has not been largely investigated.  The current paper aims at exploring students’ and teachers’ perceptions regarding the development of language skills in English, as an important aspect of acquiring a language and one of the key prerequisites for its successful use.

: In the modern society people are exposed to English almost all the time and everywhere. English is heard on TV, read in books, people from different countries communicate with each other in this language. Therefore, it is not surprising that the need for studying the effects of the exposure to English on the developing of English language proficiency has arisen. This paper examines the exposure of Bosnian students to the English language outside of the classroom and provides a comparison between private and public schools, as well as between elementary and high schools. Another aspect of investigation are the perceptions of Bosnian teachers and students regarding the use of the mother tongue (L1) in EFL classrooms. With the switch from grammar-translation method to communicative approaches, the role of L1 in English language learning classrooms has become highly disputed, and the current paper attempts to shed light on this issue..

This paper deals with teaching management of different learning styles students use in the EFL classroom. It explores various types of learning styles and it provides directions that can help EFL teachers in better understanding of various learning preferences and in responding to different types of learners. Different types of learners are also treated in this paper. In addition to theoretical explanations for every type of learner mentioned, different methods and approaches are incorporated, together with suggestions for activities suitable for particular learners. The last part of the paper is a study of Bosnian teenagers’ learning styles and their implication in teaching. The aim of the study was to investigate major learning styles of Sarajevo teenagers and how they affect their learning. The results and analysis of the study are presented at the end of this paper.

Abstract English is taught as a foreign language in elementary and high schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH). However, since the number of English classes per week is very limited they should be utilized in the best possible way to produce proficient users of English. Nowadays, when language proficiency is viewed as one’s ability to speak and write in the target language and not about it, the need for the proficiency evaluation in schools arises. The present study attempts to shed a spot of light on this issue, investigating two very common ways of assessing students’ knowledge in schools, namely tests and writing assignments. Hence, through the interviews with English teachers and the analysis of students’ tests and writing assignments, the current paper explores the ways in which these two measures are realized, the tasks they consist of, the type of linguistic knowledge they are used to evaluate, their levels of difficulty, and the type of corrective feedback teachers provide on both of them. The results suggest that teachers on both measure rather students’ explicit than their implicit knowledge, focusing much more on accuracy than fluency development.

The male-female relationship constitutes an eternal enigma analysed in different ways throughout the history. The status of women through the ages has been significantly different from the status of men; the domestic domain of their home has been regarded as a female space, while the public life has been reserved for males. Women have been invisible in many aspects of life; the procreation has been viewed as their most important function, while not protesting and accepting the fate in silence have been considered their highest virtues. The present paper illustrates how this topic is described in proverbs, and the contrastive analysis sheds light on the similarities/differences between the conception of women, men and the relationship between them in two languages: B/C/S and English. Although the results indicate that in both languages the dichotomy male-female does not divide the world into two symmetrical parts with regard to the power, freedom and rights being marked by the male dominance, the inequality is more visible in B/C/S.

The present study set out to examine learners’ explicit and implicit foreign language knowledge with regard to their age. Therefore, two groups of learners from Zenica and Zavidovići (Bosnia and Herzegovina) presented the pool of informants in this study: 100 learners completing eight-year long primary school and 106 learners completing four-year long secondary school. The knowledge of four target structures (indefinite article, modal verbs, noun plural and adverb placement) was measured by means of three different tests: an oral elicited imitation test, a grammaticality judgement test and a metalinguistic test. The results indicate that the level of explicit and implicit knowledge varies with regard to the age of learners.

This article reports on a study which analysed the role of the complexity of linguistic structures in foreign language learners’ linguistic knowledge in terms of both explicit and implicit knowledge. Since it has been proposed that different structure characteristics might be a factor influencing explicit and implicit knowledge development, the complexity of the present study target structures was varied. Implicit knowledge was measured by means of an oral elicited imitation test, and explicit knowledge by means of an untimed grammaticality judgement test and a metalinguistic test. All tests were administered to a sample of 206 participants, Bosnian EFL learners. 100 participants were learners finishing primary school (aged 14-15) and 106 were learners finishing secondary school (aged 18-19). The results indicate that the level of explicit and implicit knowledge varies depending on the structure characteristics. However, the results also suggest that there are differences in the difficulty of grammatical structures in terms of explicit and implicit knowledge development. Structures that are easy in terms of implicit knowledge might be difficult in terms of explicit knowledge and vice versa.