The category of definiteness in the language pair German-Macedonian

The monograph 'The category of definiteness in the language pair German and Macedonian' focuses on the contrastive analysis of German and Macedonian language and would be relevant for both German foreign language students (DaF-students), learners of modern German language, teachers, translators of Macedonian and German and multiplicators of German language in the Republic of Macedonia. It presents possibilities about the principles of acquiring German as a foreign language, then gives explanations about the language behavior of the students of German language, as well as the opportunity to explore different translation options, thus developing their sensitivity to language issues. The aim of this research is to help foreign language students of German in Macedonia to get acquainted with the main terminology and basic terms in this field of research and to become independent readers, learners and explorers in this field. It also provides ideas for small-scale research and gives an introduction to students about the techniques and different instruments how to conduct a research project on contrasting German and Macedonian. We analyzed the term of definiteness in German and Macedonian and came to conclusion that according to the results from our analysis, almost all the participants used the articles in a native-like manner in most cases, particularly those with high German proficiency, but also we should mention that inappropriate selection and choice for articles are being made. This monograph was designed to raise foreign language students' awareness of the differences and similarities in the language pair German-Macedonian in the field of definiteness. Its objective is also to train teachers and foreign language students how to apply contrastive analysis in their teaching and learning German as a foreign language (DaF-Deutsch als Fremdsprache), and to train teacher training students and translator students how to apply contrastive analysis in their future teaching and translation work.

Biljana IVANOVSKA has graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Skopje (R. Macedonia) with a BA in German and English language and literature, and obtained a PhD in contrastive analysis in contemporary German and Macedonian. She is currently working as an Associate Professor at the Goce Delchev University in Stip. She has been teaching contemporary German grammar - morphology and phonetics, and contrastive analysis (German and Macedonian) and she shows interest in teaching foreign languages for specific purposes. Her research and teaching interest focuses on corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics and translation studies, especially on theoretical, descriptive and applied perspectives. She is a member of the Verein des Instituts für deutsche Sprache, of the Editorial Board of the Annual Proceedings published by the Faculty of Philology in Stip and a member of many other associations and scientific societies in her own country and abroad.