Marijana Aleksić Milanović
ORCID 0009-0001-4240-9870
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology, Department of Iberian Studies
marijana.aleksic.milanovic@fil.bg.ac.rs

doi: 10.19090/cit.2025.46.57-71
No. 46 (мај 2025), str. 57-71

Role of Libraries in Learning Spanish Foreign Language: action research

Summary

This article examines the extent to which the Spanish language students at the Faculty of Philology – University of Belgrade use the library of the Department of Iberian Studies and the library of the Instituto Cervantes in Belgrade for language learning. The research is based on the hypothesis that the percentage of students borrowing materials in the language field is small but that this number increases when the criterion of year of study is applied. However, the hypothesis was only partially confirmed, since the survey revealed that while the number of students using libraries generally increases in the later years of study, the use of literature specifically intended for learning Spanish as a foreign language does not increase. The survey also indicated that a significantly high percentage of respondents learn the language exclusively from textbooks and other materials provided within their language courses, without making any additional effort in this area. Given these findings, we consider it necessary to encourage students to engage in more independent work. This could be supported by the vast amount of easily accessible non-academic digital content, which has undoubtedly facilitated foreign language learning in recent years. However, we strongly argue that the best results can be achieved through combining all available resources, rather than excluding books and that it is the teacher’s responsibility to guide students in exploring the wealth of resources that libraries offer in this area. Accordingly, we conducted an action research project, which required students to explore specific literature and present it in class. The final survey showed that after completing the project 82.9% of the participants were motivated to use library resources more for language learning, while 17.1% of the respondents selected the “maybe” option. This suggests that the project achieved its goal.

Keywords:

teaching foreign languages, learning Spanish as a foreign language, task-based approach, project-based learning, the library of the Department of Iberian Studies, the library of the Instituto Cervantes in Belgrade, library users, action research

Submitted: 4th March 2025
Correction to the manuscript: 11th March 2025
Accepted for publication: 24th March 2025

Role of Libraries in Learning Spanish Foreign Language: action research by Marijana Aleksić Milanović is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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