Research

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Education, motivation, management, learning, reading, strategies, languages, and cultures. These are a few topics I've researched. After data analysis, some of this research turned into a doctoral thesis, publications, conference presentations, seminars, training, or blog posts.
My latest work explores intercultural communication in German companies. Stay tuned for the results.

Table of Contents

Doctoral Thesis


The most challenging and demanding piece of work was the doctoral thesis.
Honestly, the work itself was not that big of a deal. Correspondence with mentors was what almost made me give up. But I really wanted to get the results and help educators and authors develop materials that encourage strategic reading and learning. Long story short – here I am with a PhD in my hand.

The study was carried out in order to establish what strategies are developed through tasks presented in textbooks for teaching English as a foreign language used in Croatian primary schools. Furthermore, an attempt was made to describe approaches and tasks teachers use when teaching reading. Finally, it aimed to present a correlation between the two key elements - textbooks and teachers.
In order to gather data, two instruments were developed – a questionnaire for teachers and an instrument for textbook analysis. The questionnaire showed good metric characteristics, primarily in terms of its reliability. 
The results of the questionnaire on the approaches to teaching reading correlate with those obtained from the corpus analysis.
In terms of teaching reading strategies, the key findings also indicate that explicit teaching, as well as teaching strategies that good readers use, are neglected.
Based on the current and other studies on strategic reading, it is proposed that more attention should be paid to teaching strategies. How? Through familiarising teachers and textbook authors with the positive effects that strategies may have on the development of reading skills and possible ways of their implementation in teaching.

Publications

  • Smuda Đurić, M. (2022). Richtig lernen leicht gemacht. Independently published.
  • Šamo, R., Smuda Đurić, M. (2021). EFL Reading with Young Learners: The Teacher’s Perspective. In: Rokita-Jaśkow, J., Wolanin, A. (eds) Facing Diversity in Child Foreign Language Education. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66022-2_17
  • Smuda Đurić, M. (2019). Towards Developing Strategic Readers - Starting Early. Croatian Association of Teachers of English: Hupezine (10), 6-7.
  • Smuda Đurić, M. (2019). Let’s Get Reading. Croatian Association of Teachers of English: Hupezine (11), 5-7.
  • Smuda Đurić, M. (2018). Types of Reading Tasks in Materials for Early Foreign Language Learning. Croatian Journal of Education, 20 (Sp.Ed.2), 259-286. https://doi.org/10.15516/cje.v20i0.2895
  • Smuda, M. (2008). Teaching Methods, Types of Classroom Interaction and Media in Foreign Language Classes. In: Cindrić, M., Domović, V., Matijević, M. (eds.) Pedagogija i društvo znanja, 351-360. Zagreb: Učiteljski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu