---
title: "English language teaching in a non-aligned nation: A comparative"
description: "The paper looks at how English entered Yugoslav secondary schools after the 1948 Tito-Stalin split. 31 references."
authors: ["Daniel Russo"]
year: 2025
venue: "MediAzioni 46"
source: "https://mediazioni.unibo.it/article/view/18357"
doi: "10.6092/issn.1974-4382/18357"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; MediAzioni)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/russo-2025-english-language-teaching-non-aligned/"
---
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# English language teaching in a non-aligned nation: A comparative study of grammar textbooks in 1950s Yugoslavia

**Authors:** Daniel Russo · **Year:** 2025 · **Venue:** MediAzioni 46 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; MediAzioni)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/18357) · [PDF](https://mediazioni.unibo.it/article/download/18357/20444) · [DOI 10.6092/issn.1974-4382/18357](https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/18357) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7115584772)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper looks at how English entered Yugoslav secondary schools after the 1948 Tito-Stalin split. Once the country distanced itself from Moscow and later helped found the Non-Aligned Movement, Russian stopped being the compulsory main foreign language. It became one optional choice among French, German, Italian and English, and English was the only one of these without a local teaching tradition. The study compares two grammar books, which were then the main classroom tools under the grammar-translation method.

- **Milan Stanković's *Gramatika engleskog jezika* (1955)** is traditional. It is built around the categories of domestic Serbo-Croatian school grammar.
- **Rudolf Filipović's *An Outline of English Grammar* (1956)** is structuralist and aimed at learners.

The author judges Filipović's book the better one pedagogically. Stanković's book still became the national standard for decades, while Filipović's was only taken up again in the late 1960s. The paper reads this as a sign of the system's stance: it moved away from Soviet models without fully adopting Western ones. The case also bears on today's debates between prescriptive and descriptive grammar teaching.

## Key points
- The Cominform condemned Yugoslavia in 1948. Afterwards, Soviet or translated textbooks were replaced by books from Yugoslav authors, and teachers trained in Russian or German were retrained for English.
- Filipović's university English course at Zagreb (1947) followed Bloomfield's structuralism and was modelled on the US Army Specialised Training Program (ASTP).
- Filipović's grammar grew out of a roughly 100-page 1954 booklet of lecture notes with no exercises. The 1956 book uses only British spelling, avoids terminology students would not know, and later ran to eighteen editions over nearly thirty years.
- Stanković's table of contents mirrors Stevanović's (1954) Serbo-Croatian school grammar. As a result, it stresses case, verbal aspect classes and gender in English.
- Stanković's example sentences foreground Yugoslavia's international role, presenting English and Russian as equals.

## Interesting ideas
- Stanković explained English through the grammatical metalanguage students already knew from their native-language classes, which lowered the entry barrier even when the fit was imperfect.
- Projecting source-language categories such as case and aspect onto English distorted the description; this is a cautionary example of mapping between grammatical frameworks.
- The less rigorous book won because it fit the institution, which shows that adoption is not the same as quality.
- Both authors stated nearly the same goals in their prefaces but weighted them differently, and the comparison works by contrasting declared aims with actual structure.
- Textbook examples quietly carried a political worldview of their era.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (answer): explanations of a parse or answer for Ukrainian-speaking users could be phrased in familiar Ukrainian school-grammar terms and linked to the underlying UD labels.
- **I2** (tree): when converting between UD dialects or treebanks, flag any target feature that exists only because a source category was forced onto it, rather than silently filling it in.
- **I3** (learn): when silver labels come from agreement among witness parsers, treat consensus as a signal of convention, and check it against independent gold or negative controls before calling it correct.
- **I4** (learn): evaluate each witness parser or teacher tier against what it claims to optimise versus what it actually gets right, per construction.
- **I5** (world): school-course and fable test material should be tagged with its source and period, so that era-specific background assumptions are not compiled into general world knowledge.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Insubria](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-insubria/) — University, Varese, Italy · 3 works · 1 citation

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🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 2,379 works

## Cite

Cite as: Daniel Russo. 2025. English language teaching in a non-aligned nation: A comparative study of grammar textbooks in 1950s Yugoslavia. MediAzioni 46.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{russo2025english,
  title = {{English language teaching in a non-aligned nation: A comparative study of grammar textbooks in 1950s Yugoslavia}},
  author = {Daniel Russo},
  booktitle = {MediAzioni 46},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.6092/issn.1974-4382/18357},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/18357}
}
```

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## References

31 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 2 November 2026*