Good communication skills are of utmost importance in the education of engineering students. It is necessary to promote not only their education, but also to prepare them for the demanding and competitive job market. The purpose of this study was to compare the attitudes towards communication skills after formal instruction between the students of engineering studies in the first and sixth semesters. Data were collected using the Communication Skills Attitude Scale (CSAS) which consisted of 14 items. The target population included 31 students of engineering studies who attended the communication skills course in the first semester, and 31 students of engineering studies who attended the same course just before the completion of the undergraduate study programme. The results are in accordance with previous studies suggesting that senior and more mature students have higher positive attitudes compared to the students at the beginning of their undergraduate studies. Although both groups had noticeable positive attitudes towards learning communication skills, negative attitudes should also be taken into consideration and an attempt should be made to decrease them.

Abstract

To think about the material life of metaphors means to understand space as the projection of the inner self of their occupants. In order to occupy a foreign space one has to negotiate one's own vision of the world with the landscape one occupies. In the case of migrant writers metaphors of space are especially significant. This paper will discuss the novels Milenijum u Beogradu (Millennium in Belgrade) and Venecija (Venice) by Vladimir Pištalo, and the collection of short stories Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust by Josip Novakovich. Pištalo and Novakovich were born respectively in Bosnia and Croatia and now live and write in the USA and Canada. In Pištalo's literature places house memories and meditations about the Balkans and Mediterranean, while Novakovic explores a war-torn Balkan world which determines his protagonists' lives even when they migrate to a better and safer space where they have a fresh start. The aim of this paper is to explore the concept of "home" as the "original shell" (Bachelard) according to which every place in which we dwell has the "meaning of the universe". In addition, it will tackle Bhabha's vision of the home of migrant writers in the discursive space of their own literature.

Even in the world of fiction, it would be unusual for a European country to experience the war at the end of 20th century, fall apart and disappear. This exactly happens in Josip Novakovich’s novel April Fool's Day. It is a Bildungsroman about life, death and the afterlife of Ivan Dolinar, a Croatian citizen of Yugoslavia, whose life undergoes unbelievable twists and changes as the social and political situation in the country deteriorates until it falls apart and a new homeland, Republic of Croatia, is formed. On the basis of historical facts, the author develops a story about a fictional hero, who himself is a personified disintegrated country: the instability of the main character shows the instability of the state. During his life, driven by the fate and historical forces, Ivan becomes a political prisoner, a murderer, a rapist, an adulterer, a thief and finally, a ghost. Only when considered dead, he can be a master of his life. Ivan Dolinar finds harmony in his afterlife: as a ghost he is liberated from all the living inherences, in his death he feels free, important and unique, what he did not succeed during his living days. The novel is simultaneously a war and a ghost story with strong satirical impulse and black humour targeted towards human vanity and imperfection, lust, hatred and absurdity of war in general. The aim of this paper is to explore the interconnection between the fact and fiction in the novel, which intended to be, according to Novakovich, “an obituary to Yugoslavia in a personal form“. This fictional story that describes details about life and death of Ivan Dolinar is a story of a war-torn country which can only live in the form of a ghost until it completely disappears from our minds.

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