Each year, the National Assessment of Knowledge (NAK) measures the knowledge of students in Year 6 and Year 9 in two fundamental school subjects (Slovene and Mathematics) and a third one, which is established as a first foreign language for the sixth graders. The curriculum is the foundation for this Assessment, the function of which is formative, meaning that the students’ achievements provide an objective feedback based on their acquired knowledge in relation to the relevant curriculum for pupils, teachers and schools. With this information, all participants in the school system gain insight into the shortcomings of their learning or performance and are given an initiative to improve the quality of the educational policy. In order to carry out comprehensive and appropriate interpretations that would be of use to a particular school as a tool for further teaching English in 6th grade, we investigated 3 sets of data in the empirical part, all related to NAK in English in 6th grade. We compared the achievement of students of a particular school with the national average in the period of 2014-2019 at the 6th grade NAK in English, and explored the views of students attending sixth grade in 2018/2019 as well as 6th grade English teachers of the NAK in English. From the gathered data of achievements of the NAK in six years, we found that the typically strong or typically weak trend of English knowledge of sixth graders of a particular school in a certain area of communication abilities does not appear in comparison with the national average (generations of 2015, 2018 and 2019 generally achieved better results). Most of the surveyed students (66 %), who attended 6th grade in the school year 2018/2019, consider national knowledge examinations as useful and meaningful for them, which is not acknowledged by any of the interviewed teachers, since they believe that the NAK results do not present a meaningful feedback. They affirm that their teaching practice does not support equal treatment for all the communicative skills, and that their students' written communication is the weakest area in knowledge assessment, which is not directly confirmed by the reviewed NAK achievements in 2014–2019. From the data collected and some discrepancies between all the sources covered (six-year achievements of students of a particular school, pupils' and teachers' attitudes towards the NAK) it is concluded that the teachers concerned could pay more attention to the NAK achievements and in-depth data analyses as an assistance for their teaching. In the final part, we formulated recommendations for teachers in teaching English to further generations of students in a particular primary school.
|