The Slovenian-Croatian border already in the past did not mean to disintegrate people of different nationalities. People were crossing the border (in both directions) for a variety of reasons, sometimes only temporarily but often permanently. Slovenes in Croatia did not pay attention to national identity and did not form a special attitude towards the Slovene language. After the break-up of the Socialist federal republic of Yugoslavia the position of the Slovene people has been changed, they have become a national minority in Croatia. At that time they started to feel the desire to self-organize and learn the Slovene language.
The Slovene minority in Croatia is provided with various possibilities and support in preserving the Slovene language, as well as Croatian and Slovene legislation. In accordance with Croatian legislation, within the school system it has the right to teach Slovene language and culture in primary and secondary schools under the so called minority school model C. On the part of the Republic of Slovenia it is enabled to learn the language within the summer school for children and adolescents, the MIZS project in Varaždin and supplementary Slovene language classes. It will be written about this in the theoretical part of the master's thesis, where we will pay a little more attention to the supplementary teaching of Slovene language. We have seen that in the recent years the number of those enrolled to the supplementary classes have been increasing. Individuals of all ages (from preschool children to adults) have been included because of different motives, which are on one side mostly practical in nature, and on the other side they wish to preserve national identity. The biggest challenge for teachers are heterogeneous groups. Thus, they use different teaching methods and forms in the class and they combine different teaching materials. There is also very important to cooperate with competent educational services and parents to reach good results.
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