One of the expected abilities of teachers and pupils is a developed communicative ability in the Slovene standard language. Based on communicative context different language varieties are used in communication. For most children, their mother tongue is a dialect by the time they enter school. Many children are exposed to the standard language at an early age, when their parents read them fairy tales, when they watch cartoons, television... But when they start school, they begin to learn the language systematically. This is why the teacher plays a major role in learning a standard language and sets an example for the pupils. The Slovenian curriculum (Primary School Curriculum, 2018) also points out that the purpose of language teaching is to develop communicative competence in the Slovenian standard language. One of the building blocks of communicative competence is linguistic competence, which includes syntactic/grammatical/conceptual competence. Slovene is one of the few languages in the world that has three grammatical numbers: singular, dual and plural. The dual is certainly a special feature of our language.
Despite the fact that the dual is a special feature of our standard language, some Slovenian dialects do not use it. One such example is a dialect from the Bela Krajina region of Slovenia. Instead the dual, the plural form is used, which is why speakers from Bela krajina often have problems with the use of the dual in the standard language. Because I come from this region, I have also encountered this problem during my studies. There were several occasions when we had to make presentations in pairs at different subjects, and then my classmate, who is also from this region, and I had to be really careful to use the dual correctly. These situations were the main reasons that motivated me to write my master's thesis on the use of the dual. I wanted to see how 5th grade pupils in different primary schools from Bela krajina, who already have well-developed all communicative abilities, use the dual in the standard language.
I carried out an action research study, using a quantitative research approach due to the large sample size. The overall results of the action research showed that systematically integrating the use of the dual in the classroom contributes to better use of the it. On the first test, all participating fifth-graders scored an average of 14.93 points, while on the second test they scored an average of 17.84 points.
Based on the findings, the final chapter of the empirical work includes guidelines for teachers on how to systematically integrate the reinforcement of the use of the dual in the classroom. In this way, I aim to ensure that the findings of the research have an impact on improving the use of the dual already in younger generations of learners, especially those speaking in dialects where dual is not used.
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