Teachers' education for Croatian heritage classrooms

As part of the project Croatian as a heritage language – the current situation and developing perspectives, conducted in 2013 – 2015, teachers of Croatian as a heritage language (CaHL) in various countries participated in a survey on teaching processes, curricula and teaching materials, as well as their possible needs for vocational training. The responses from an online questionnaire were collected from at least 40 teachers, who have been divided into two groups: a) employees from the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports, with 1 -3 year work contracts, mostly citizens of Croatia and b) employees of institutions/associations/(Croatian) communities in targeted countries and teaching volunteers, mostly citizens of those targeted countries.
The aim of this paper is to present the collected data using descriptive and nonparametric statistics. The results show that there are common issues that teachers of CaHL encounter regardless in which country the teaching occurs. There are also some specific issues that differentiate the two above mentioned groups. In this paper special emphasis is given to the teachers’ specific needs during the initial teacher training required to successfully work with heritage speakers in the future.