Linguistic Development in Italian L1 and L2 in Italian Nursery Schools in Slovenia

Schools with Italian as the medium of instruction in Slovenia are open to all children and young people, regardless of their ethnic affiliation. The article addresses the impact of linguistically diverse classes on the linguistic development of children attending Italian nursery schools. The children’s parents provided basic background information on the child’s language use outside nursery school. The level of the children’s communicative competence in Italian, in terms of listening comprehension and oral production, was measured by means of a standardised test. Although results may not always be statistically relevant due to the small number of participants, they show that the prevailing presence of children that only speak Slovene at home does not hinder the linguistic development of children that only speak Italian at home, and that the Slovene-only cohort clearly benefits from attending Italian nursery school.