SPREMNOST ZA OVLADAVANJE VJEŠTINAMA ČITANJA I PISANJA NA HRVATSKOME JEZIKU KOD DJECE ROMSKE NACIONALNE MANJINE ‒ JEDNAK POČETAK ZA SVE?
READINESS OF ROMA CHILDREN FOR READING AND WRITING ACQUISITION IN THE CROATIAN LANGUAGE – AN EQUAL STARTING POINT FOR ALL?

Summary/Abstract: Over 16,000 people belong to the Roma national minority in the Republic of Croatia. Given the fact that they do not have their own standardized language and orthography, Roma children attend regular schools and regular curriculum in the Croatian language. This also implies the acquisition of reading and writing prerequisites prior to enrolment into first grade. The aim of this paper is to examine the level of acquisition of reading and writing prerequisites in Roma children and to determine whether Roma children (N = 56, 62.5% of boys, M = 6 years, 8 months, SD = 0.46) differ from children whose first language is Croatian (N = 55, 50.9% of boys; M = 6 years, 8 months, SD = 0.4) in the development of individual components of reading and writing prerequisites. Testing was performed through selected tasks from the Test for the assessment of reading and writing prerequisites (PredČip test, Kuvač Kraljević & Lenček, 2012). The results were as expected and indicate that Roma children deviate from regular achievement on most of the examined variables. In comparison to the control group of participants, Roma children demonstrated significantly lower results on almost all tested variables, apart from syllable and phonemic blending. The obtained results are an indicator of insufficient acquisition of certain components of reading and writing prerequisites in the Croatian language and insufficiently developed visual-perceptual abilities. Considering that reading and writing prerequisites are the important precondition for fluent reading and writing, it is clear that Roma children are not prepared for school education and that they demonstrate difficulties in keeping up with their peers at the beginning of formal school education. This implies the need for a systematic change of the preschool and school system with regards to this especially vulnerable group of children.

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