Internal Differentiation and Individualization in Textbooks for Teaching Slovene at Primary Level in the Bilingual Slovene-German Area

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a textbook that, from both a linguistic and a didactic point of view, introduces activities and authentic texts for two fundamentally different language levels of Slovenian learners in primary schools. Linguistic heterogeneity is not only everyday school life with traditionally established methods, but it also puts many challenges to teachers, especially if they independently prepare individualized learning materials on a daily basis and implement internal differentiation in lessons. In the first part of the paper, the existing teaching material for bilingual lessons in the subject of Slovene is presented. In the second part, a model of internal differentiation in the classroom is proposed. As a next step, this paper focuses on the design of the textbook, which mediates communicative activities and with a text-based method enables progress at (at least) two different language levels, such as beginners in learning Slovenian and students at the language level B2.