Abstract
The paper presents results form a study on acquisition of Turkish grammatical categories by first grade Turkish speaking minority children in Bulgarian primary school. Two groups of children speakers of Turkish are tested: ethnic Turks and ethnic Roma. The Roma are Muslims and are also speakers of Turkish. Both groups speak the Northeast variety of Turkish, spoken in the surroundings of Varna, Bulgaria. The author examines the lexical reaches, syntax complexity and narrative knowledge of the children and predicts that the low results on mother tongue tests will be a reason for difficulties in the second language acquisition - Bulgarian. The author connects the results of mother tongue knowledge of the children with the language interdependence theory of Cummins (1991), where the level of the mother tongue is a predictor of second language acquisition.
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Highlights
Turkish minority is one of the biggest minorities in Bulgaria
The main goal of the study is to find out what is the level of knowledge of Turkish by Turkish children and Turkish speaking Roma children (6-7 years old), when they enter the primary school in Bulgaria
We studied the skills of Turkish children to introduce characters in stories by two series of pictures – A story with a Horse and A story with a Cat (Kyuchukov, 2000)
Summary
Turkish minority is one of the biggest minorities in Bulgaria. According to the census from 2011 their number is approximately 588. 000 or 8,8 % from the total population. One part of the Muslim Roma in Bulgaria is Turkish speaking and they identify in most of the cases as Turks as well. The total number of the Turkish speaking community in the country is approximately 606 000 or 9.1 %. The last 30 years the position of the Turkish minority in the society became very high – there is a Turkish party, which is the third political power after the Democratic and Communist party in the country and thanks to this the Turkish minority have obtain many rights in Bulgaria. The second right which they got was to study their mother tongue organized in schools 4 h per week, together with other minorities such as Armenians, Jewish and Roma. The mother tongue classes have been introduced only in primary schools (grades 1 to 8), but not in kindergartens (Kyuchukov, 2007)
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