The master's thesis upgrades the existing, otherwise rare, Slovenian research on the education of young journalists in elementary schools. We were focused on two novelties upgrading the subject area, i.e. findings about working methods used during journalistic courses and findings about the linguistic and genre-forms of contributions in school newspapers. For this purpose, we used three research methods: observation with participation in three Slovenian primary schools and one private school in which the course combines elementary school pupils and gymnasiums; interviews with mentors of journalistic courses at selected schools and text analysis. It turned out that mentors use different working methods, but despite the differences, the following elements are included in all cases: discussion with pupils about texts, writing texts (at a course and/or at home), fieldwork, other communication related to the courses (if necessary via e-mail, but never through social networks to which mentors are reserved for security reasons), and indirect language education as an upgrade of the regular course of Slovenian language. Furthermore, we found that the content of school newspapers is diverse and that journalistic genres are in minority compared to contributions of other types (literary, artistic, entertainment etc.). The pupils generally have knowledge of the characteristics of journalistic genres and linguistic errors are rare in published texts, which is provided by mentors who are mostly teachers of the course of Slovenian language. We were also interested if newspapers fulfil the mission of journalism, and we found that they do (of course, to the extent that is possible at this stage of education).
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