Study Of Language Competence In Pupils In First Year Of School Attendance With Accent On Mother Tongue

Abstract

Communication is an inevitable element in social interaction between people. The developed mother tongue is an advantage of a child when starting school. The mother tongue is the language a child learns as the first one in the process of socialization (Lemhöfer, Schriefers, Hanique, 2010), the language a child has learnt in his/her life, and which influences a child’s future. Basil Bernstein (1971) considers a language the main means of person’s socialization, and emphasizes a direct relationship between a social group and a language. In our paper, we discuss language competence in pupils in the first year of school attendance. The paper objective is to bring findings about language maturity in pupils whose mother tongue is Romani in comparison with pupils whose mother tongue is Slovak. The sample included pupils with the Romani mother tongue (n1=69) and pupils with the Slovak mother tongue (n2=76) in the first year of primary schools. The field diagnosis had two phases: the initial phase – at the beginning of a school year, and the final phase – at the end of the school year. In our study, we used the Heidelberg Speech Development Test (H-S-E-T) (Grimmová, Schöller, Mikulajová, 1997), where the authors differentiate between language competence, language performance, and language levels. The test provides a rather complex picture about an achieved level of language development in children. Our testing within the Heidelberg test focused on Sentence building (SB). The findings that we state are interesting also in the moment where the diagnosed children whose mother tongue is Romani had significantly lower scores than the children whose mother tongue is Slovak. We associate this status with the possibility that children whose mother tongue is Romani come from socially disadvantaged environment that is accompanied by poverty and social exclusion. The environment children grow up in significantly influences their communication abilities. To some extent, our findings correspond with Pierre Bourdieu (1990) who, based on his theory, states that children from socially more stimulating environment – families gain better habitus and cultural capital as they are more prepared for school, are more linguistically capable, and understand the notions significantly better, and vice versa. We draw attention to the fact that children from Roma families with the Romani mother tongue have average performance, and we evaluate the differences in the scores as statistically significant.