Abstract English is taught as a foreign language in elementary and high schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH). However, since the number of English classes per week is very limited they should be utilized in the best possible way to produce proficient users of English. Nowadays, when language proficiency is viewed as one’s ability to speak and write in the target language and not about it, the need for the proficiency evaluation in schools arises. The present study attempts to shed a spot of light on this issue, investigating two very common ways of assessing students’ knowledge in schools, namely tests and writing assignments. Hence, through the interviews with English teachers and the analysis of students’ tests and writing assignments, the current paper explores the ways in which these two measures are realized, the tasks they consist of, the type of linguistic knowledge they are used to evaluate, their levels of difficulty, and the type of corrective feedback teachers provide on both of them. The results suggest that teachers on both measure rather students’ explicit than their implicit knowledge, focusing much more on accuracy than fluency development.

The male-female relationship constitutes an eternal enigma analysed in different ways throughout the history. The status of women through the ages has been significantly different from the status of men; the domestic domain of their home has been regarded as a female space, while the public life has been reserved for males. Women have been invisible in many aspects of life; the procreation has been viewed as their most important function, while not protesting and accepting the fate in silence have been considered their highest virtues. The present paper illustrates how this topic is described in proverbs, and the contrastive analysis sheds light on the similarities/differences between the conception of women, men and the relationship between them in two languages: B/C/S and English. Although the results indicate that in both languages the dichotomy male-female does not divide the world into two symmetrical parts with regard to the power, freedom and rights being marked by the male dominance, the inequality is more visible in B/C/S.