Tools for assessing the language proficiency of Roma children and pupils in the Roma language

Despite a number of measures taken so far under the national action plans for Roma, improvements have not been achieved to the expected extent, especially in the field of education. The analysis of the distribution of Roma pupils by years of primary school generally shows a significant decline in the number of Roma pupils from 1st to 9th grade, with, on average, only one fifth of Roma pupils completing primary school. As explained below, there are multiple and interrelated reasons for the lower academic performance of Roma, but a good knowledge of the first language (Romani) is indispensable for successfully upgrading linguistic competence in the second language, i.e. Slovene, which for Roma is also the language of instruction and the only tool for academic success.

The purpose and objective of the project is to develop a toolkit to identify the level of linguistic competence in Romani among Roma children. Such is needed to gain a basic insight into the linguistic competence of the aforementioned children in the pre-school period and in the first three years of primary school. An insight into the individual components of communicative competence, primarily its linguistic aspect in the Romani mother tongue, can yield significant theoretical and applicative findings and facilitate the design of effective methodological approaches in academic work:

• the data collected with the toolkit will serve as a basis for the design of educational programmes for Romani as L1 and potentially also as L2;
• the knowledge of the initial linguistic repertoire in Romani L1 will also serve as a basis for planning the necessary didactic approaches and procedures for teaching Slovene as a language of instruction and as a subject;
• for the first time in the history of Romani language studies in Slovenia, a baseline linguistic corpus of the development of Romani at the pre-formal, operational stage will be created;
• adapted versions of the toolkit will be useful in testing the linguistic competence of children belonging to other minority or migrant communities;
• designing such a toolkit also poses a particular challenge for applied linguistics, as it is intended to identify the level of linguistic competence achieved in a language with a distinctive oral tradition whose written form is just starting to develop.

The toolkit will thus serve as a basis for monitoring language-policy measures aimed to develop the communicative competence of members of the Roma community. The linguistic competence of Roma children is one of the conditions for ensuring an inclusive and equitable educational system. Strengthening the linguistic competences of Roma children in their mother tongue increases their chances of preserving their cultural identity, doing better at school, continuing schooling, and obtaining an education. In addition, strengthening the linguistic competence in Romani (i.e., the mother tongue of the majority of Roma children in Slovenia) also strengthens Roma children’s potential to learn Slovene as L2. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to identify – through the analysis of hitherto research and published scientific and professional literature – the existing possibilities for learning Romani and develop an adequate toolkit for measuring/assessing linguistic competence in Romani. The latter will be at the focus of the proposed project. The tool for measuring/assessing linguistic competence in Romani will enable the assessment of the current state of play and hence the development of appropriate measures to improve the linguistic competence of Roma children in Romani. The tool could also be used for future monitoring of the effects of the measures taken or the progress made by Roma in relation to communicative competence.