NEGATION IN SERBIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

The paper examines the content on negation in teaching and learning Serbian as a foreign language. The aim is (1) to isolate the content on negation in teaching Serbian as a foreign language then (2) to consider it from various aspects (lexical, morphological, syntactic, orthographic), and (3) to propose its arrangement by proficiency levels. In the research we started with the analysis of the content on negation from the textbooks for Serbian as a foreign language (from 1986 to 2017), which made up the primary corpus of the research. Additionally, tests carried out by foreign students at the Faculty of Philology and Arts in Kragujevac (from 2016 to 2019) were used as supplementary corpus. The analyzed textbooks of Serbian as a foreign language showed that the authors had somewhat different approaches to selecting content at the same level, primarily depending on the mother tongue of the students, while the analyzed tests showed that students at each level of proficiency managed to successfully master the competences that were in the current negation-related curriculum. It is concluded that the content on negation is appropriately distributed according to the levels of proficiency in the existing curriculum for Serbian as a foreign language. The general methodological recommendations which our research brings forward are that, in addition to the content that has been processed so far, additional content regarding the lexical and syntactic aspect of negation should be introduced at an advanced level. For future research, the lexical and syntactic aspect of negation in Serbian as a foreign language remains to be thoroughly examined.Publishe