摘要：Contemporary theories and approaches to teaching greatly emphasize the importance of students in the teaching and learning process. While it is unquestionable that students should be at the heart of the teaching and learning process, this paper seeks to emphasize the importance of the overall quality of teacher proficiency with an emphasis on language proficiency. In order for communication between students and teachers to flow smoothly, it is extremely important for teachers to be linguistically educated and linguistically competent to handle their work. Teachers in Croatian schools obtain the final certification of their qualifications by passing a professional qualification examination, which, among other things, examines their ability to communicate in a standard language. The aim of this paper is to determine the extent to which teachers have mastered the standard language norm on the basis of a linguistic analysis of the content of the essays written by the candidates in the professional qualification examination. For the purpose of our work, we have chosen history teachers, since in our daily work with history students we have noticed numerous difficulties in their written expression, from spelling through grammar to lexical and stylistic imperfections. Based on the obtained results, we found that history teachers did not sufficiently master the norms of standard language during their studies, and that they made numerous linguistic errors in their essay entries, in all normative levels, which indicates a mandatory need to implement language courses in all history studies.
其他关键词：Croatia, history studies, professional qualification examinations, professional essays, teacher language competences
