Some Notes on Comprehension and Comprehensibility in Contemporary Slovene

The Case of the Slovene National Language Test

Abstract

This paper investigates Slovene school pupils' levels of oral and written comprehension in the Slovene language and the appropriateness of the requirements which exclude or limit specific norms, forms or varieties. The results of the National Knowledge Test (Nacionalno preverjanje znanja – NPZ) reveal that pupils' difficulties not only in producing linguistically correct and coherent texts of any kind on their own, but also in summarising topics and in logical reasoning are increasing year on year. It is particularly striking that a significant number of pupils do not even reach the minimum standards in the use of their own language after 9 years of schooling. According to NPZ statistics, pupils have considerable difficulty extracting relevant information from source texts and using it in texts of their own, even though these tasks are, according to the curriculum, among the minimum standards tested. Students have even more difficulty with tasks that also require analysis and synthesis. This is particularly evident in pupils' independent production of complete and coherent texts (in addition to texts of specific types or genres), despite the fact that this is a guided writing task with relatively precise instructions concerning the required content, and despite the fact that pupils have to write similar texts (such as the interpretation of graphs) in other subjects. Particular attention should also be paid to the linguistic accuracy or appropriateness of the texts produced. Although these are minimum standards, the lowest-achieving pupils in this unit score barely above zero.