Developing Minority-Language Didactics Through Collaborative Action Research: A Didactic Model from Slovene-Medium Schools in Italy

Slovene-medium schools in Italy are public schools in which Slovene is the language of instruction and the protected language of the Slovene national community, yet many pupils encounter Slovene mainly through schooling. This creates a didactic situation that cannot be adequately described as first-, second-, foreign- or heritage-language education. This article analyses how a minority-language didactic model was developed through a six-year collaborative action research process in Slovene-medium schools in Italy (2019–2025). Using retrospective documentary analysis, the study reconstructs four accredited professional development programmes (2019–2022) and subsequent phases of consultation, curriculum refinement, teaching-material development, documented practice-based revision and extension into assessment development. The bounded analytical corpus comprised 36 sources: 22 documentary sources and 14 teaching units. Qualitative analysis mapped the corpus chronologically, coded recurring didactic problems and compared outputs across cycles. Findings show a two-dimensional model: a process dimension connecting sociolinguistic diagnosis, collaborative professional learning, curriculum development, whole-school language support, material development, implementation and assessment alignment, and an instructional dimension based on differentiation, adapted input, contextualised grammar, communicative integration, scaffolding, formative feedback and school-wide language modelling. The article contributes an analytically transferable model for supporting multilingual students in minority-language-medium education where the language of schooling is socially less dominant outside school.