Kontrastivni pristup obradi egzistencijalnih rečenica u nastavi inojezičnoga hrvatskog

This paper deals with the contrastive approach to teaching Croatian as a second language on the example of analysis of existential constructions. It offers a short overview of the studies on transfer errors from the German language during acquisition of Croatian as a second language, and then analyses existential constructions in these two languages in more detail, comparing them as well. What follows is an analysis of existential constructions with regard to the students’ age or language proficiency. The first group consists of heritage speakers of Croatian language in German speaking countries involved in the program of learning Croatian abroad, while the second group consists of adult learners involved in different programs of learning Croatian as a second language in the Republic of Croatia. Since complex morphosyntactic structures cannot be entirely covered within one teaching lesson, the proposition to cover them in terms of three different levels of command of Croatian as a second language for both age groups has been offered, with the aim of preventing or at least mitigating the negative transfer from the dominant language system to the target language. Attention is being paid not only to the principle of appropriateness to students’ age or language proficiency, but to principles of gradualness and systematicness as well, so the use implicit instruction of existential constructions has been suggested on lower levels, and explicit instruction on higher levels.