Over the last decade, on the national level, the performance of students in the mother tongue in the matura (baccalaureate) examination has been below grade 3. The author examined the causes for this underachievement at several levels; more lesson time was devoted to autonomous production of written discourse. In addition, a portfolio system was introduced to monitor individual student's production and to analyse their mistakes. Students' own texts served as a basis for the presentation of the theory of language. With regard to the fulfilment of the communicative purpose, a system of language errors was developed and the assessment of the achievement of the student production was adapted. The experiment has shown that the students not only achieve better results if taught and assessed according to the adapted system, but they also acquire a higher level of literacy.
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