Features of Slovene English as a foreign language year 6 students' writings

The MA dissertation discusses features of the English as a foreign language (EFL) Year 6 students' writing in Slovenia. In the literature review, communication and writing, writing in English as a second/foreign language, writing and assessing students' texts in EFL/ESL and the written assignment on Slovenes' National Exam of English in Year 6 are thoroughly discussed. The analysis of the written texts in EFL/ESL is also defined, with the emphasis on the empirical research of foreign research studies. The empirical part consists of the features of the EFL Year 6 students' writings in Slovenia, which were defined by applying. Qualitative and quantitative methods on a sample of 110 scripts of Year 6 students' writings taken from the Year 6 National Exam in English in Slovenia. The results show that the forementioned writings were 72,06 words long. The less successful students wrote the shortest texts (44,77 words), the average students wrote medium-sized texts (68,95 words), and the most successful students wrote the longest texts (95,65 words). The more successful students wrote longer texts, which is compliant to other research studies. The complexity accoriding to Ure (1976) was 10,20 %, and grammatical errors were the most common. The study also shows that the most frequently used words were: 'in', 'be', 'I', 'you', 'a', 'can', 'and', 'the, 'do' in 'town'. 78,8 % of the first 50 most frequently used words are also the ones matching the corpus New-GSL 500. According to the discriptors of the CEFR, they are at A1 level (from 90,4 % to 96,2 %), the rest belong to A2 level. Moreover, the first 50 most commonly used words were nouns (28,8 %), verbs (19,2 %), pronouns (13,5 %), prepositions (13,5 %), adverbs (9,6 %), adjectives (5,8 %), conjunctions (5,8 %) and articles (3,8 %). 'In the', 'live in' in 'it is' were the three most commonly used two-words phrases, and the 'I live in', 'a lot of' in 'in your town' were the most commonly used three-words phrases. The readibiliy factor (Gunning Fog index) was 3,8, which is a somewhat higher than expected result, because the students' from the sample were formally learning English for about 3 years