Jezik in slovstvo

Kodni sistem
Slovenska književnost
Avtorji
Uredništvo <-> bralci

Jezik in slovstvo
Povzetki

Boža Krakar-Vogel

Realizem maturitetnega eseja
The Reality of the Matura Essay

Slovenski sinopsis
English synopsis
English summary

Slovenski sinopsis

Članek prikazuje zasnovo maturitetnega eseja v Sloveniji, izvirajočo iz sodobnih ciljev pouka književnosti in stanja v praksi, in jo primerja z rešitvami v nekaterih drugih sistemih preverjanja znanja. Razčlenjuje podobnosti in utemeljene razlike ter nakazuje možnosti za spremembe pri pisanju eseja kot posledico dosedanjih analiz in opazovanj ter prenovljenega učnega načrta za pouk književnosti v gimnazijah.

English synopsis

The concept of the matura essay in Slovenia is presented, based on the contemporary aims of teaching literature and the situation in schools. It is compared to solutions in several other systems of knowledge testing. Similarities and informed differences are discussed, as well as possible forthcoming changes in essay writing resulting from analyses and observations done so far and from the renovated curriculum for teaching literature at grammar schools.

English summary

In designing didactic changes in practice, all classroom factors students, teachers, aims and content of a subject (in our case, literature) --- as well as a number of other relevant circumstances have to be taken into account. This was the philosophy behind designing the matura essay as part of the external matura examination in the Slovene language in the early 1990s. In accordance with contemporary concepts of teaching literature, the essay was defined as a written task in which students describe in a synthetic way their reading of literary works in terms of individual personal response to the text, understanding, evaluating and classifying it, drawing comparisons and a final conclusion. Written essay assignments with similarly defined aims exist also in other systems of external examination.

As a result of various circumstances, it has proved pedagogically justified to provide students with taxonomically structured instructions to help them in organising their thoughts, bringing together various levels of literature reading and reaching a higher validity and reliability of their texts. At the same time, these instructions serve as an instrument for designing exact criteria of an analytic scoring system that is used in Slovenia to supplement the descriptive evaluation in order to provide for a more reliable essay scoring. Each essay is scored according to both systems by two external examiners. Discrepancies between the two examiners' final scorings appear in a very small percentage of cases.

The formulation of instructions to students and the scoring system are peculiarities of the Slovene system, with several points of convergence and divergence when compared to other educational systems; these are discussed more in detail.

In the new curriculum, literature teaching is designed so as to provide for a process-based learning of practical literary criticism and its realisation in the form of an essay. In future, it will be possible to make instructions for matura candidates less normative, and to use unfamiliar texts for interpretation in essays. Several other systemic changes may also be introduced that suggest themselves on the basis of the analysis of matura essays written by past generations.