Page 326 - Pedagoška vizija / A Pedagogical Vision

Blaž Klasinc and Mojca Žefran

preschool children in Slovenia have a first language other than Slovene. A
similar percentage (8.22) can also be seen in primary education, where the
number of pupils from other countries was 16,204 (Statistical Office of the
Republic of Sloveni n.d.b). These preschool children and pupils mainly come
from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Ukraine, Serbia, the Rus-
sian Federation and other European countries, but also from Asia, Bulgaria,
Montenegro and others (Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia n.d.b).
The above data, however, do not include children who are Slovenian citizens
but were born to parents who speak languages other than Slovene, so the
number of speakers of other languages is possibly even higher and, due to
growing migrations, linguistic and cultural diversity is becoming an impor-
tant topic in educational settings.
Embracing linguistic and cultural diversity in order to foster multilingual-
ism aligns with the EU’s efforts to encourage such diversity within its borders.
Moreover, one of the key objectives of the EU language policy (Sasse and Milt
2024) is to provide every EU citizen with a multilingual education to enable
them to communicate in at least two languages in addition to their mother
tongue. With the promotion of plurilingual and pluricultural competencies in
mind, the EU has produced several documents, such as the Common Euro-
pean Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe 2001), which
provides a comprehensive framework to assess and compare language profi-
ciency across different languages and serves as a basis for language syllabus
and curriculum development. The CEFR defines six levels of proficiency by
describing language skills in listening, reading, speaking and writing, provid-
ing a clear, standardised criteria for foreign language proficiency assessment.
Furthermore, the CEFR Companion volume (Council of Europe 2018) offers
several upgrades and enhancements, such as the inclusion of new descrip-
tors for mediation (facilitating communication between speakers of different
languages) and plurilingualism (using languages as an integrated commu-
nication repertoire), as well as providing expanded scales for several areas,
such as phonology and sign language, and also pre-A1 levels, which were
less detailed in the original framework and can be used with younger learn-
ers. The promotion of linguistic and cultural diversity in Slovenia is reflected
in its Resolution on the National Programme for Language Policy 2021–2025
(2021). According to the document (Resolution on the National Programme
for Language Policy of the Republic of Slovenia 2021–2025 2021), the promo-
tion of the Slovenian language is prioritised, but there is also an emphasis on
fostering language diversity by supporting Italian and Hungarian as the mi-
nority languages, as well as the languages of different ethnic minorities and

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