Developing students' communication skills is one of the main goals of Slovenian language teaching. This also includes developing their naming or vocabulary skills (Bešter Turk, 2011). Dictionaries can be of great help in this regard. Until recently, their use in schools was not widespread (Godec Soršak, 2015), but then we got the Franček portal, which is the first interactive educational online dictionary and grammar portal for the Slovenian language (Ahačič et al., 2021). This greatly facilitates the use of dictionaries in class for teachers and is more interesting for students to use because it is online.
We noticed, during our teaching practice, that teachers rarely use the Franček portal, or some teachers are not even familiar with it, and although many students have heard of this portal, they have not yet used it (independently), also we have not found any research on the use of the Franček portal in teaching. This is why we decided to investigate whether teachers are familiar with this portal and to what extent they include it in their teaching. We also wanted to investigate how well 5th grade elementary school students navigate the portal and how various factors influence their familiarity with it. We obtained the answers using a questionnaire for teachers and a questionnaire and an exam for students.
We have found that most students are familiar with the Franček portal, but they use it relatively rarely in class, and they also use it very rarely or not at all at home. Most students know how to look up the meaning of an unfamiliar word and find a synonym. Students have difficulty determining how many meanings are listed in the dictionary entry for a given word. Students have difficulty finding the correct meaning of a word based on context. Most students know that they must type the word into the search box in its base form; likewise, most know how to find a proverb containing a specific word and how to look up the meaning of that proverb. Most students know where and how to find the correct pronunciation of a word on the Franček portal and where to find the standard form of the word. Fifth-grade elementary school students’ familiarity with the Franček portal is quite good; according to the survey results, as many as 82.2% of students at ŠSSJ are able to navigate the Franček portal well or very well.
The results of the survey showed that most of the teachers who participated in it are familiar with the Franček portal and also use it with their students in class. According to the teachers, most students enjoy using the portal. Half of the participating teachers use the portal with their students in class occasionally, while the other half use it often. Some participating teachers enable their students to use the portal, while others do not. All participating teachers who are familiar with the portal encourage their students to use it, and most encourage them to use it both at school and at home. All participating teachers use the portal to look up the meaning of words, and most teachers use it to look up synonyms. While the participating teachers use the portal for Slovenian language classes, most also use it for other subjects.
We conducted a knowledge test to assess how well students know the ŠSSJ on the Franček portal. We found that familiarity with the ŠSSJ does not differ based on students’ gender, but it does differ based on their final grade in Slovenian. Students with higher grades (grades 5 and 4) are more familiar with the ŠSSJ than students with lower grades (grades 1, 2, and 3). Students who are already familiar with the Franček portal performed better on certain tasks related to the use of the ŠSSJ; however, these differences are not consistently evident across all tasks or in the overall results. The frequency of using the Franček portal in class does not result in differences in students’ familiarity with the ŠSSJ. Students who use the portal at home (at least occasionally) achieved higher scores on the knowledge test than students who never use it. Based on the sample of teachers included in our study, we can conclude that based on a descriptive comparison, it is not possible to confirm that familiarity with the ŠSSJ on the Franček portal is related to the number of years a teacher has been in the profession. Similarly, for this sample, we can conclude that all teachers who are familiar with the portal encourage their students to use it. Due to the small sample size, it is not possible at a descriptive level to confirm a correlation between a teacher’s years of experience and the frequency with which they use the ŠSSJ on the Franček portal with their students.
This study provides insight into how well students navigate the Franček portal, what they do well, and what challenges they encounter, particularly which types of information they find more difficult to locate. Teachers can gain insight into the aspects they should pay particular attention to when teaching students how to use the Franček portal, which features they should emphasize, and what the most common difficulties students encounter are. It is also largely up to teachers to decide whether and how we will inspire students or equip them to work with dictionaries.
|
