Ethnic Issues – Coordination and Evaluation of Project Activities (Italian National Community) 2022

The Importance of Schools with Italian as the Language of Instruction on the Coast for Preserving the Vitality of the Italian National Community

In this year’s professional development project, we expanded upon the research we conducted in 2021 to gain a broader picture of attitudes toward the Italian language in education. We included 9th-grade students from four elementary schools in our study with the aim of examining attitudes toward the Italian language, which is taught as a second language (L2) in Slovenian schools within the ethnically mixed environment of Slovenian Istria. In the ethnically mixed region of Slovenian Istria, the Italian language has equal status with the Slovenian language, and Italian is a required subject starting in the 1st grade.

The study reveals that students do not use Italian outside the home (for example, in stores, at the doctor’s office, in sports clubs, etc.), but instead communicate mostly or exclusively in Slovenian. The fact that students do not use Italian, except during Italian language classes at school, is also confirmed by the fact that the majority of respondents never read books (73%) or magazines (78%) in Italian. Likewise, most students do not listen to music (31% never, 24% less than once a month), do not watch TV (37% never, 18% less than once a month), and also do not use the Internet or social media in Italian (58% never).

Regarding language proficiency, students rated their knowledge of the Slovenian language as very good, which is confirmed by an average score of 4 across all categories or skills (writing, reading, speaking, and comprehension). In contrast, students rated their knowledge of Italian as average, meaning neither good nor bad. This is also confirmed by the average scores for individual items, where the average does not exceed 3.1.

However, we note that the final grades achieved by students in Slovenian and Italian language classes do not reflect their opinions or their actual knowledge.