The Master’s thesis assesses the linguistic competence in school teachers who have to demonstrate a high level of communicative competence in order to pass knowledge to students effectively. Communicative competence consists of various components, including stylistic and linguistic competence. The latter is further divided into lexical, grammatical, orthographic and orthoepic competence. The Slovenian language is the official and main language used in schools, which is why both spoken and written texts, formed by the teacher, must be in Slovene. Written texts they form are mostly formal, for example notice, record, drafts etc., which means that the communicator of such texts must comply with certain linguistic and stylistic rules. On the other hand, spoken texts are formed particularly in classrooms. When talking about the prescribed topic during the process of teaching, teachers have to use Contemporary Standard Slovene.
The empirical part of the thesis explores the teachers’ ability to form written and spoken texts. For the purpose of research, teachers’ notifications, invitations, records and lesson plans were collected. We analysed linguistic errors with regard to different components of communicative competence, and the results show that most errors occur in spelling, style, orthography and grammar. Furthermore, the findings indicate that teachers make more mistakes while establishing relationships with students than during the process of teaching; that the correlation between competence to form written texts and competence to form spoken texts is rather weak, and that teachers with less years of service make less mistakes than those with many years of service.
Based on these results, the rate of teachers’ communicative competence can be established, which can be further developed by using our recommendations on how to set up programmes that could encourage teachers to improve.
|
