Journal of Education and Humanities

17-28

Authors: Haris Delić

It is important for the effectiveness of learning environments to consider group or individual learners’ characteristics, competences and experiences throughout the process of planning learning environments. This study aimed at investigating the differences of language learning styles between males and females and among four high school grades. The participants were 90 male (46.2%) and 105 female (53.8%) high school students studying at public religious high school (Madrasa) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. For testing the main research questions, a 5-point likert scale questionnaire was distributed to 195 high school students. While no significant correlation was found between learning styles and gender, a significant correlation was unexpectedly found between learning styles and grades. These results are a good platform for the research of gender and grade based differences among language learners.

51-64

Authors: Lejla Isaković

The English language has for a long time occupied a central position on a global scale and been used by speakers of various linguistic backgrounds for successful communication. This has especially been proven in practice by the world of business, with an overwhelmingly large number of corporations operating across state borders and linguistic and cultural barriers. With the change of field and medium, it is inevitable that the language itself is going to change and adapt to new needs and applications. Electronic communication is the main means of correspondence between such internationally operating companies, and this paper took it up to investigate how the medium influenced the language of e-mail messages between business people with different native languages. 59 e-mail messages between a company from Bosnia & Herzegovina and a company based in Romania were gathered and manually tagged for syntactic variation. To answer the question of whether BELF favoured linguistic purity over matter or vice versa, we looked into grammar, syntactic structures, vocabulary, e-mail openings, and request-making strategies. All these parameters were considered as indicators of BELF formality/informality. The conclusions reached here are generally in line with the way in which BELF was characterised by some of the most important investigators in the field. Significant variations from regular grammatical standards were displayed in the language at hand, and BELF was here marked as being semi-formal, with some aspects leaning towards informality and other towards formality. Overall, it seems that business people have no regard for linguistic purity, while they value the main point of the message, facts and numbers to a much greater extent.

76-93

Authors: Asim Šahinpašoić

U okviru ovog rada analizirana je etika javnog komuniciranja kao platforma za samoregulaciju odnosa s javnostima. U analizi je korištena deduktivna metodologija, a problematika etičke samoregulacije analizirana je na prakseološkom, fenomenološkom i ontološkom nivou. Analizirana je primjena etičkih principa i teorija, baziranih na utilitarističkim i deontološkim pristupima na području odnosa s javnošću. Posebnu pažnja posvećena je dilemema u vezi sa primjenom etičkih postulata u komunikacijskoj praksi, a predstavljeni su i etički kodeksi koji se primjenjuju u PR profesiji kao i osnovne smjernice za primjenu PR etike u rješavanju komunikacijskih izazova.

16-38

Authors: Eva Gröstenberger

The study aims to investigate how gender and achievement affect foreign language anxiety (FLA) scores among 379 Austrian students in upper secondary education. The analysis revealed that the majority of students display moderate levels of overall foreign language anxiety, a compound variable of general foreign language anxiety, foreign language reading, writing and listening anxiety. A two-way ANOVA showed a significant main effect of both gender and achievement on the participants’ overall foreign language anxiety scores, but no significant interaction effect. Moreover, a two-way MANOVA proved that both gender and achievement had a significant main effect on the combined variables with large effect sizes. The interaction effect of gender X achievement on the combined variables was significant, albeit with a much smaller effect size. Gender and achievement thus emerged as influencing factors in the creation of FLA in Austrian upper secondary education, in particular with regard to the productive language skills.

49-63

Authors: Michael Wukowitsch, Barbara Geyer-Hayden

The use of videos in teaching is becoming more and more widespread. For this purpose, not only existing videos are used, but also exclusive videos are created. There are different types of instructional videos used and created for teaching. It is useful to know which design principles these videos should follow in order to evaluate the quality of existing learning videos and to know the criteria one should consider when creating exclusive instructional videos. Therefore, questions arise as to how these videos should be designed to equally support theory and practice and what educational requirements they should meet for the use in teaching. These questions are answered with the framework of the study in hand that applied the method design-based research, incorporating qualitative and quantitative research methods. Survey instruments were guided interviews with experts, questionnaires for school students and a focus group. Participants in the study were teachers and students from the Vienna University of Teacher Education. The field of application was nutrition and consumer education for teaching students of the middle school. The results are presented in the form of design principles.