A lot of children whose first language/mother tongue is not Slovenian attend Slovenian schools. Children who enter the education system in our country late have a different starting point for learning than other pupils in the class whose first language is Slovenian and who begin their school education in the first grade. Learning the Slovenian language as a second language and rapid integration into a new environment is a great challenge, yet also the main goal for both these pupils and their teachers.
The main purpose of the master's thesis was to demonstrate the progress made by a 9-year-old Korean girl in Slovenia in her initial stage of learning the Slovenian language and acquiring literacy. When she came to Slovenia, she was enrolled in the third grade of elementary school without knowing any Slovenian words. At the request of her parents, she was also given after school help at home (by me) for one school year. The course of our individual work is presented in the empirical part of the thesis.
Despite some errors, progress was obvious. She developed the skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening because these abilities are intertwined in language learning. The greatest progress was seen in reading. Her reading became more and more fluent and she also understood much better what she had read. She also successfully participated in the programme of extra reading at home called Reading Badge. She made great progress in pronunciation (orthoepy), which was clearly seen in loud reading and speaking. Her naming skills in the Slovenian language as well as sentence formation developed and she began to form sentences, although they were somewhat deficient (wrong verb tenses, wrong use of gender and number, incorrect declensions). In the category of listening with understanding, she had problems due to her poor vocabulary. The biggest problem was writing because she had to learn how to read and write in the Latin alphabet and because certain words are written and pronounced differently in the Slovenian language. In addition, she used writing less frequently than speaking. The girl's progress was influenced by various factors: systematic acquisition of the language (by various didactic approaches in individual lessons), personal interest and diligence, a positive and trusting relationship between her and me (and her teacher at school), active integration in the new environment, socializing with her peers, and parents’ cooperation with school teachers.
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