Pupils foreigners pose a big challenge to the Slovenian educational system, teachers and all other pedagogical workers who work with them. In the master's thesis I discuss adaptation of teaching social science for pupils who experience difficulty understanding the Slovene language. For these pupils Slovene is their second language.
The theoretical part refers to the integration of pupils foreigners into the Slovenian educational system, the way it is defined in the legislation, how the programme Successful integration of immigrant children is being implemented, which difficulties arise with the integration of pupils foreigners, how this is dealt with in other countries, and how learning of the second language or language of the environment is proceeding. I also studied forms, methods and approaches of learning and teaching social science, which I classified on the basis of my own reflection into more and less suitable for pupils foreigners.
The research, which is presented in the empirical part, includes a pupil foreigner and two teachers who taught him during the observation time (in the 2nd and 4th grade). The data were collected by observation of classroom lessons in the 2nd grade, and with semi-structured observation in the 4th grade, as well as with semi-structured interviews of the pupil and teachers in the 2nd and 4th grade. Data analysis is made on the basis of set research questions, and is with the data collected rounded up into a meaningful whole. I found out that the teacher mostly used the pupil’s mother tongue and other types of help at the beginning of his education. In the 3rd year of pupil’s education in Slovene his mother tongue was not used anymore by the teacher, since the pupil foreigner showed great progress in understanding Slovene. During the observation the pupil helped himself a lot with following the example (e.g. the way a particular mathematical problem was solved on the board or in the textbook made it possible for him to solve following problems). In the 4th grade the pupil was most of the time offered other types of help, such as encouragement, help with self-review of tasks and products, etc. During the observation in both grades I also paid attention to problems which occurred during the lesson. In the 2nd grade lack of motivation and some problems with the language were noticed. In the 4th grade, however, some other problems appeared, for example bad handwriting and orientation on the paper.
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