Tako LakoThe capital is Sarajevo, and the country comprises two autonomous entities: The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. The third unit, the Brčko District, has its own local government. Throughout history, Bosnia and Herzegovina was at the crossroads to different empires, such as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, which helped create a unique center of cultural diversity.
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A highly geographically diverse country. The ten regions offer beauty and diversity in nature, culture heritage, and gastronomy. Each region offers breath-taking destinations that will give you memories for life. The Croatian coast is known as the pearl of the Adriatic with its crystal clear water and hundreds of islands. The country’s capital is Zagreb, located in the north part of the country.
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https://croatian.takolako.org
Montenegro’s capital is Podgorica, but its cultural center is the historical capital of Cetinje. The country is small yet rich in history and incredibly diverse. You can go from the sea to the mountains in an hour. You can explore the Mediterranean and continental climate in a day. The Montenegrin coast is one of the jewels of the Adriatic. The Montenegrin language was standardized in 2009.
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The capital of Serbia is Belgrade, a cosmopolitan city, rich in cultural and historic heritage, and built at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. Beyond urban cities like Belgrade and Novi Sad, Serbia’s enchanting landscapes offer plenty of opportunities to experience active holidays, rural retreats, traditional food made according to old family recipes, and family holidays.
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The integration of culture into language learning is facilitated through the implementation of the task-supported language teaching (TSLT) approach, which is closely related to the task-based language teaching (TBLT) approach. In both approaches, “a task has a real-world relationship” (Skehan, 2018). However, the difference between two approaches is that TSLT allows explicit grammar instruction, while in TBLT grammar is mainly acquired through implicit processing. For that reason, the use of TSLT makes better sense for teaching grammatically complex languages, such as B/C/M/S, because at times more explicit grammar instruction is needed to help learners learn the forms that cannot be acquired incidentally.
In its task design, the curriculum utilizes the principle of the three-stage cycle advocated by Ellis (2003) in most of the lessons. They are structured into pre-task, main task, and post-task stages. Even though the main stage is the only required stage, Ellis (2003) advocates for the inclusion of the other two stages as they influence task performance and learning gains.
Each stage allows one to move systematically from products and/or practices to perspectives in a way that helps learners gradually develop cultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence. This refers to the first three steps of the four-step process for the development of cultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence, developed by the author of the textbook. In this three-stage lesson design, Tako lako also integrates grammar by utilizing VanPatten’s Processing Instruction, which is an approach to teaching grammar that pushes learners to process grammatical forms while keeping meaning in focus.
Step 4 for intercultural development is always a separate lesson and occurs at the end of the unit and is part of the two-stage cycle lesson (main task and post-task). This unit-final lesson allows learners to demonstrate their ability to navigate real-life situations in which they might find themselves in the B/C/M/S area and display their intercultural communicative competence in a unit-final role-playing task. These role-play tasks replace the traditional pen-and-paper test. These tasks showcase not only learners’ interpersonal and cultural communication skills, but also their ability to improvise, emotionally engage, and negotiate meaning, something that is not possible in the traditional test format. After completing their unit-final role-playing tasks, learners are asked to submit reflections on their own and their peers’ task completion as a post-class activity. This exercise in reflective thinking allows learners to further analyze and express their understanding of the cultural perspectives relevant for their role-play and to identify how the performance could be improved.