Reading and writing skills training for Roma children

In the master's thesis, we focused on reading and writing skills as well as school performance among Roma students. Despite the fact that the educational system seeks to maximize literacy among all students, there are many Roma students who leave elementary school without adequately developed literacy skills. Theoretical background includes the explanation of the current situation and shows how specific characteristics of Roma population impact the education of Roma students. Deficits related to reading and writing skills obstruct achieving the appropriate level of literacy that could raise their school performance and successfully influence various activities within the school and in everyday life. As early as in the first educational period, these students require specific trainings in order to improve their reading and writing skills, which would allow them to use learned strategies in everyday situations. The purpose of the thesis is to design a specific training, which would support Roma students in improving their reading and writing skills. The training encompassed four Roma students from the second grade of the regular elementary school. Intensive eight-week training incorporated individual sessions with each student, sessions with a pair and an hour-long group support in the class, all carried out two times a week. It is designed as a third stage support of the model Odziv na obravnavo. The main goal of the research is to determine the effectiveness of the training and its impact on the development of the reading and writing skills as well as skills related to reading and writing among Roma students such as graphomotor skills, fine tuning skills, visual-motor skills, phonological awareness skills, visual and auditory memory skills, vocabulary, reading fluency and reading comprehension. Prior to the training, with the help of subtests from ACADIA test, SNAP test and the Test of reading and writing impairment, we identified aforementioned cognitive abilities of the Roma students involved in the training. With the questionnaire (author's work), at the end of the training, we checked how the class teacher assesses the effectiveness of the training. The mentioned sub-tests were repeated after the completed training. By comparing the results of both assessments, we evaluated the effectiveness of the training. According to the results, the training proved to be successful, as the students improved their cognitive abilities (decoding, fluency, vocabulary, memory, language skills, graphomotor skills, etc.), reading comprehension and metacognitive strategies, which indicated success and a necessity of such training. All of the students developed an interest and motivation to solve various reading and writing tasks as well as the interest to participate in the activities. All the activities carried out within the training were presented to the teacher, who already tried to incorporate them to her teaching during the training. With the selected activities and the presented way of assistance we want to contribute to the development of special-pedagogical forms of assistance for the improvement of reading and writing skills among the Roma pupils. The set of strategies supports the search of adjustments for the more independent inclusion of the Roma students into the education system with appropriately acquired reading and writing skills