LANGUAGE MATURITY IN ROMA CHILDREN IN THE FIRST YEAR OF SCHOOL ATTENDANCE

Communication is an inevitable element in social interaction between people. The key role, either negative or positive, in the development of children's speech is played by parents as well as teachers. The developed mother tongue can be an advantage or disadvantage for a child when starting school. The mother tongue is the language children learn as the first one in the process of socialization (Lemhofer, Schriefers & Hanique, 2010), the language children have learnt in their life, and which influences their future. Our paper discusses language competence in pupils in the first year of school attendance by providing findings on language maturity in pupils whose mother tongue is Romani in comparison with pupils whose mother tongue is Slovak in the first year of school attendance. The sample included pupils with Romani as their mother tongue (n1=69) and pupils with Slovak as their mother tongue (n2=76). The pupils attended the first year of primary schools with Slovak as the language of instruction. The Heidelberg Speech Development Test (H-S-E-T) (Grimmova, Scholler, & Mikulajova, 1997), was used to differentiate between language competence, language performance, and language levels. The findings reveal pupils whose mother tongue is Romani lag very far behind in language maturity in comparison with pupils whose mother tongue is Slovak, which confirms the premise that for children from socially disadvantaged environments, school is an inequitable place for children's development. (C) 2019 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org.UK