Slovene A2/B1 Students’ Morphosyntax

The aim of this article is to make an error analysis based on a corpus consisting of 58 written tests in Italian on the vocational maturity exam of Slovene mother-tongue students at an A2/B1 level. The objective of the qualitative and quantitative analysis is to identify the most frequent errors in the field of morphosyntax, to find out the causes, and to compare them with the results that emerged from previous research studies. The qualitative analysis was carried out on the basis of a grid created after I had completed a contrastive study of Slovene and Italian and later adapted to the data that emerged from the corpus. The causes of errors are negative transfer from L1 and in a small percentage from other foreign languages such as English and Spanish, but also the generalisation strategy. Quantitatively, the most problematic part of speech is the article, a part of speech that Slovene does not have, followed by the erroneous form or use of verbs and prepositions. The other categories, which exceed 1% of all errors and are therefore included, are the agreement between constituents, word order, and errors related to different uses of the pronoun, adjective, noun, and adverb. This frequency of errors matches other similar research studies carried out in the past with the difference that other studies included students with different Slavic languages as the L1. This suggests that all Slavic learners have the same problems in Italian written production, therefore the first cause of morphosyntactic errors is the difference in the grammatical structure between L1 and L2.