The perception of the “English element” in Croatian ICT magazines with undergraduate and graduate computer science students

Abstract

This paper focuses on the results of a questionnaire distributed to a group of undergraduate computer science students at a Croatian university who had English in computer science 1 and 2 as ESP mandatory courses and then to a group of graduate computer science students who used to have these English courses. The central part of the questionnaire focused on the “English element” - language borrowings at various levels of orthographical, phonological and morphological adaptation to Croatian and unadapted expressions collected from Croatian information and communications technology (ICT) magazines. The main aim was to establish whether the students from both age groups found the “English element” acceptable in the standard Croatian language of journalistic register and to what extent. The results showed that the “English element” was perceived as predominantly acceptable, and the more adapted the terms were to Croatian, the less acceptable they were, regardless of the students’ age and personal and professional development