Linguistic Terms in Contemporary High School Textbooks of the Croatian Language

The aim of this paper was to investigate the level of uniformity in the use of linguistic terminology in contemporary high school textbooks of the Croatian language created according to the 2019 subject curriculum guidelines. Previous research has pointed to a significant lack of uniformity and inconsistency in the use of linguistic terminology, especially seen in using several admitted terms, i.e. pairs and sequences of synonyms. To obtain a complete picture of the uniformity of linguistic terms in contemporary textbooks of Croatian, which provides insight into the ways of shaping textbook discourse, the research was conducted in two phases, whereby this paper is part of the second research phase. The first phase included contemporary primary school textbooks of Croatian for grades 5–8. The second phase, presented in this paper, includes contemporary high school textbooks of Croatian, i.e. four sets of textbooks, which makes a total of 16 textbooks. The research results were compared with the terminology in the 2019 Croatian language subject curriculum, the former Teaching Program for Grammar Schools from 1994, and contemporary school language manuals, more precisely school grammars and orthography and spelling books. The analysis was conducted by examining textbook linguistic terminology at the phonological level, morphological level, level of word formation, syntactic level, lexicological level, and orthographical level. Compared to primary school textbooks, significant inconsistencies have been found in high school textbooks in the use of linguistic terms at all observed levels, except for the orthographical level, where terminological uniformity can be noticed at both educational levels. In addition to the lack of uniformity among the textbooks, there is also a lack of uniformity in relation to the subject curriculum and the approved language manuals, which is most often reflected in the use of terminological pairs. However, certain different terms are the result of theoretical dilemmas that have not yet been resolved.