Slovene as a foreign language

Slovene as a foreign language is a rather young discipline. We can look for its beginnings in the 60’s, when the first Seminar of the Slovene language, literature in culture took place at the University of Ljubljana, with the intention to bring together experts on the topic from abroad.
This event asked for materials to teach the language, lectures to broaden horizons and research projects to start developing this young discipline. Since then, the institution I like to call my professional home, the Centre for Slovene as a second and foreign language, has organized and developed an immense number of research and other projects, events, conferences, summer schools, language courses, materials etc. and we can with all certainty state that it is the very foundation from where the discipline itself and its development originate. I would like to present briefly to you this institution and two of its latest projects, that I am participating in:

1. KOST (korpus slovenščine kot tujega jezika; corpus of Slovene as a foreign language): with the development of new technologies corpus linguistics has become indispensable part of researching and teaching (foreign) languages. There is a variety of corpora available for Slovene language and KOST is the latest one being built. It offers a valuable insight into the written production of learners of Slovene as a second and foreign language that can be used in a variety of ways for teaching and research purposes.

2. Graded readers: books, written in an easier variant of the language, are nothing new for the big languages like French, English, Russian etc. but for Slovene this is a new area. The first grader reader in Slovene language has only been published in 2021 and I would like to guide you through the process of creating this first book, that I co-authored. 


Ivana Petric Lasnik est diplômée de langue, littérature slovènes et pédagogie de l’Université de Ljubljana et enseigne le slovène au niveau universitaire depuis 2005. Avant d’enseigner à l’ULB et à l’Université de Gand, elle a travaillé dans plusieurs universités en Grande Bretagne (University of Nottingham, University College London) et en Croatie (Université de Zagreb). Elle est co-autrice de plusieurs manuels de slovène langue étrangère de divers niveaux et participe régulièrement à des projets en collaboration avec le Centre de Slovène langue étrangère.