Literacy of Roma children: Analysis of Oral and Reading Competences

Tina Dović, Elementary school OŠ Grm, Slovenia

In previous research, school failure of Roma children has justifiably been linked to the language barriers and to their socio-cultural underprivileged position, however, so far we have not had a detailed insight into the actual language skills of Roma children, which would be based on empirical research. With this research, we wanted to demonstrate that for the successful integration of Roma children in the education system, the appropriate initial literacy training is urgent. Therefore, we were determining the reading abilities of Roma pupils at the end of the third grade of elementary school, when the literacy process was already completed. In addition, we studied their verbal skills; namely, children’s storytelling contains a significant prognostic value in the development of literacy. The obtained results further highlighted a huge gap in knowledge between Roma and non-Roma children, which only increases when children progress from class to class. In the light of modern findings about literacy as “emergent literacy”, the empirical quantitative research with the appropriate statistical analysis has offered an important insight into the problems of the education of Roma children and at the same time it opened up the opportunities to develop new, more appropriate systemic solutions, which could be implemented into school practice.