(Un)successful Start of Initial Reading

What Do Children Need and What Will They (Not) Learn in the First Weeks?

Abstract

The maturity and readiness of children for school is a major topic of the teaching and parent population. Professionals discuss the importance of individual components of school readiness from different perspectives. In this article, we focus on children's readiness to read. We describe and explain the reading process as a skill that requires preparation and a certain level of mastery of the skills that precede reading. We place these skills in the context of a psycholinguistic approach. The article describes which skills are important for initial reading according to this approach and shows through the available Czech data whether/how far these skills are available to children. We also present a research study, a content analysis of the preparatory period of the initial reading textbooks. The aim of the study was to quantify and qualitatively evaluate the tasks developing one of the skills defined in the introductory part as key for initial reading (specifically phonological or phoneme awareness). The research method is content analysis of the initial reading textbooks (Living Alphabets) in the first step of the preparatory period and in the second step of the moment of acquaintance with the first grapheme. The results point to the fact that the representation of this area in the preparatory period of textbooks is minimal. The discussion places the findings in the context of pre-primary education and suggests a solution that would bring better continuity in the transition from pre-primary to primary reading education.