The problem of successful schooling of Roma children remains among the major unsolved problems within the Slovenian education system. Roma children usually enter primary school without being previously included in any kind of pre-school education. Their knowledge of the official (Slovenian) language is poor, and their home environment often does not provide adequate living conditions; in most cases, it is quite discouraging for schooling in general. When they enter the school system, Roma children are faced with almost insurmountable difficulties in the acquisition of the required skills and knowledge. Despite the numerous legal solutions (individualization, differentiation, various forms of learning assistance), the gap between the Roma and other children only widens over the years: Roma pupils do not meet the standards of knowledge, they have difficulties in advancing to the next grade and in most cases they quit school (too) early.
So far, the research has exposed the social and cultural deprivation as well as the fact that Roma children are in fact speakers of another language as the main reasons for such meagre results. However, the actual linguistic competences of the Roma children remained a black box as there was no empirical research in this field. With this survey, we intended to demonstrate that the proper early literacy development process is indeed crucial for the successful integration of Roma into the education system. Therefore, we wanted to determine the level of reading competences of the Roma pupils at the end of the third year of elementary school, when the literacy process is supposed to be already completed. In addition, we explored their oral skills; in particular, children’s storytelling has a significant prognostic value in the development of their literacy.
The empirical part of the survey was conducted by using standardized tests (Ocenjevalna shema bralnih zmožnosti for reading competences and Preizkus pripovedovanja zgodbe: Žabji kralj for oral competences). It included 30 Roma pupils and 30 of their non-Roma peers from six primary schools in Dolenjska and Bela krajina (both groups were balanced in terms of gender and grade). The results of both tests shed a new light on the (increasingly) large gap between the knowledge of Roma pupils and their non-Roma peers. Namely, the results of Roma pupils both for reading and oral competences were significantly worse in comparison to the control group. Apart from that, the results of Roma children varied significantly in relation to the places they were living. Thus, the results of the quantitative research (and the statistical analysis) offer fresh insights on the differences between Roma and non-Roma children – especially in the light of the contemporary findings about “emergent” and early literacy. In the conclusion, the opportunities to develop new, more appropriate system solutions for literacy development within the school practice, are being discussed. Such solutions are the encouraging of an earlier inclusion of Roma children into the (preschool) education, implementation of compensatory programmes focused on literacy development (both at the preschool stage and at the beginning of elementary school), and additional training of teachers.
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