PERCEPTIONS OF SPEECH COMPETENCES IN FIRST AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS (Percepcija govornih kompetencija u materinskome i stranome jeziku kod učenika završnih razreda srednje škole)

The paper examines the attitudes of secondary school students, e.g. grammar school and craftmanship secondary school, toward their ownlanguage competences in the native (Croatian) and foreign (English) language.The testing instrument is a questionnaire with statements compiled accordingto questionnaires used to study attitudes toward the native and / or foreignlanguage. The aim of the research is to observe the level of awareness ofthe respondents about their own language competences. The results of thestatistical analysis indicate that the students of both populations are satisfiedwith their speaking skills in both languages. They also claim to recognize theirown errors, as well as the errors and speech disfluencies of others. Grammar school students, unlike students from the craftmanship secondary school, findthe introduction of a course that would further develop speaking skills useful.The obtained results are not in line with the dominant curricular guidelines forteaching the native language, especially those related to the area of speakingcompetences, emphasizing the need to strengthen the basic, spoken, andconsequently written competences of students. The reasons for such attitudescould be explained by insufficient knowledge of the underlying features ofhighly developed communication competence and consequently of insufficientawareness of their own, as a necessary prerequisite for successful interactionin the contemporary society. The research results point to the necessity ofacquiring a more objective perception of students about their own languagecompetences.Keywords: speaking competences; speech errors; speech disfluency; students’attitudes.