Change of curriculum for Slovenian language, profession researches and also opinions of practitioners in the last two decades raised a lot of questions about literacy of students at the beginning of school or even in preschool time. New questions are arising about what teachers can do to help with literacy – mostly when to start and how to present it to students. Slovenian curriculum has been updated, so that students, after the teacher’s judgment, are learning big capital letters in first class. Before that they started learning it in second class. After reading foreign literature and other curriculums we can question ourselves, weather our students are more capable in first class than we think. Could they learn to read and write not only simple texts, written with large capital letters, but a lot more? We have a good example of that in bilingual schools in Kärnten, Austria. In Theoretical part of this final paper are terms about literacy and bilingualism. Empirical part presents results of research, which we got by interviewing teachers, observation and analysis of documents. In our research we compared literacy in monolingual school in Slovenia and bilingual school in Kärnten, Austria. We found out that by the end of second class students in bilingual school reach some goals, which in monolingual school are planned for the end of third class. There are similar goals in curriculum for students from both schools; only students from bilingual school have to achieve them in two languages – German and Slovenian. In monolingual school systematical literacy starts after about six months, in bilingual it starts already in second month of first year of school. Both schools use the same method of literacy and similar forms and methods of teaching; however in bilingual school students have much more homework. We also found out that students in monolingual school in first class are learning only alphabet of big capital letters, while in bilingual school in the same time period they are learning both big and small letters, in some schools even big and small written letters.
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