A study of spelling errors made in French as a second language by students from the Roussillon Gypsy community: a case study
This article explores the spelling skills of Gypsy students at the CE1 level living in the southernmost part of France, in a context where it is widely believed that people of Gypsy origin with no “culture of writing” lack virtually any such skills. The text compares free-writing productions, in the context of national evaluations, by Gypsy and non-Gypsy students who underwent schooling in the same socio-economic community. This study shows that students belonging to the Gypsy community are in no way lesser writers than the others; to the contrary, their written productions reveal more solid language proficiency than that of non-Gypsy students.