The paper examines the results of the CEFR alignment project for the Slovenian national examinations in English. The authors aim to validate externally the standard-setting procedures by adopting a socio-cognitive model of validation (Khalifa & Weir, 2009; Weir, 2005) to analyse the scoring, context and cognitive validity of three reading subtests: the Slovenian B2 national examination and the international examinations FCE and CAE, aligned with B2 and C1 respectively. The relative comparability between the three subtests is determined by analysing the results of tests that have been administered to a group of 80 test-takers (expected CEFR level: B2). The placement of the test-takers also reveals to what extent the judgements of the Slovenian panellists about CEFR levels coincide with those reported for FCE and CAE. The study thus also explores whether the high degree of agreement between the judges on the alignment panel can be solely attributed to their adequate and precise understanding of CEFR descriptors - which is directly mirrored in their setting of the cut scores and relating the examination to relevant CEFR levels - or whether it can also be ascribed to their shared educational, national and cultural background. The answers to these questions are paramount because they reveal the descriptive adequacy of CEFR descriptors and because different interpretations of CEFR levels can significantly affect national testing policies and, consequently, language teaching and testing.
COBISS.SI-ID: 56449378
There is a large presence of translators without formal education in the Slovene market, partly because until the 1990s there were no independent translation programs, but also because of the popular notion that anybody who speaks a foreign language well, or has a degree in it, can translate. In this paper we pres - ent a comparison of four B.A. programs at the University of Ljubljana (in three foreign language departments and one department of translation) to shed light on what knowledge and competences are expected at the end of the B.A. studies, and to find out whether these departments actually train people to be translators. The paper also reports the results of a translation quality assessment of third- year students of those departments, who were given the task of translating a text into their L1. The students approached the task in different ways and produced very different results, which indicates that language competences alone are not enough for translation, and that specific additional instruction can give them a considerable advantage at the beginning of their careers.
COBISS.SI-ID: 57806946
As user-generated content is on the rise both in terms of volume and importance, the long established relation between spoken and written communication needs to be re-examined in lexicography. This is the aim of this paper, in which we perform a corpus-based analysis of typical non-canonical words in spoken and computer-mediated communication in Slovene. The results show that the spoken and the Twitter corpus contain a similar proportion of non-standard pronunciation/spelling variants, interaction words and informal lexemes. On the opposite end of the spectrum are news comments which contain a higher proportion of nouns and a smaller proportion of non-canonical words. The presented study brings a language-independent methodology of identifying typical elements of spoken and written informal texts.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38801965
The aim of the paper is to look into how the use and distribution of complex verbal phrases in English comply with the postulates of the theories of constructional iconicity, frequency asymmetries and naturalness, especially in the initial stages of their proliferation. The three theoretical frameworks are first outlined and compared, and predictions ensuing from them are formulated as to the expected behaviour of complex versus simple linguistic constructions. Two types of complex verbal constructions are examined from the point of view of these predictions: the progressive verbal phrase "be" + present participle and the composite predicate consisting of a semantically bleached verb + deverbal noun.
COBISS.SI-ID: 59385442
The article aims to shed some light on the growing tendency of Slovene native speakers towards borrowing English personal names when naming new-born children. Some historical overview of the borrowing of English personal names into Slovene is given, starting with lists compiled from 1931 onwards, established from the data supplied by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia (SURS). The phenomenon of borrowing personal names is discussed from the point of view of pragmatic borrowing as advocated by G. Andersen (2014), taking into account the traditional distinction between necessary loans on the one hand and luxury loans on the other. The article illustrates how in the case of personal names, ‘exoticisms’ (e.g. Alex, Liam, Kevin, Kim, Ian, Vanessa, Adrian, Ella, Emma, Patrick, Nick, Alan, Lucas, listed among the most popular 200 first names in the 2001–2013 period) compete with name forms that have been adapted and nativised long ago (e.g. Patrik), or are currently being introduced for the first time into Slovene. In these recent borrowings, the foreign forms undergo some adaptation, but at the same time, unlike other anglicisms, show the tendency to resist complete adaptation, particularly in terms of spelling and pronunciation. Such pragmatically borrowed items carry significant sociolinguistic signals about the borrowers’ attitudes, and these are briefly commented on.