Abstract:

One of the key prerequisites for socialization and academic success of younger school-age pupils is communication. This involves the ability to use language for understanding and knowledge acquisition, exchange information and developing of interpersonal relationships. The academic success of pupils depends largely on their language skills, i.e. their ability to perceive and produce oral and written texts, and on the quality of their verbal delivery. Narratives, texts with a narrative structure, contain temporality, causality, and characters in a specific environment. These textual production is a cardinal component of pupils' everyday interpersonal communication, not only in the school environment. They vary in level depending on the language setting of the pupils from which they come. The aim of the research study was to analyse the differentiation of the actual level of written expressiveness of eight-year-old pupils in a language-heterogeneous, diversified primary school class. The study presents the results of qualitative-quantitative research of narratives using comparative content analysis. The validated conceptual reference framework for the evaluation of narrative stories was used for the analysis, taking into account the ontogenetic specifics of eight-year-old pupils. The research findings pointed to significant differences in the narrative stories and written expressiveness of pupils from socially disadvantaged backgrounds in marginalised Roma communities. Their narrative production contained a high proportion of words and grammar from their mother tongue in syntagmatic combinations with Slovak and Czech lexemes, to varying degrees (73.3%). The active vocabulary of the teaching language or second language is significantly lower in percentage terms for these pupils compared to the majority of pupils. The research findings were utilised in the development of a language program and teaching materials to support the learning of the Slovak language for children with a different mother tongue. The study was the partial output of the research task within the Project Programme of Linguistic Development for children with a different mother tongue in Slovakia - creation and verification. The study is the partial output of the research task within Project Programme of Linguistic Development for children with a different mother tongue in Slovak - creation and verification.

Acknowledgement:
This work is supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the Contract no. APVV-22-0450. and the Project KEGA 008UMB-4/2024 Creation of Textbook and Methodological Material for Teaching Slovak Language for Children of Slovaks Living Abroad.

Keywords:

Foreign language teaching, narrative, pupils with a different mother tongue, primary education.