The fundamental aim of Slovene lessons is to develop communication competences as competences of receiving and producing diverse texts. The curriculum for Slovene gives a special attention to teaching of reading and writing, with the aim of teaching to not merely master the fluent reading and writing, but also to use written language to communicate, think, create, learn, and for entertainment. Therefore, the aim is to enable all children to achieve a higher level of so-called critical literacy. One of the ways to achieve this aim is to train pupils in knowing and using different strategies in the process of reading as well as in the process of writing, and doing that with the intention to make the pupils aware of these processes and use them as efficiently as possible while reading or writing.
This master thesis studies the development of reading and writing competences in fourth grade pupils. The main aim of the thesis is to find out how developing of reading and writing competences influences the reading and writing strategies. While reading literacy has been a subject of research abroad and in Slovenia several times, the research of writing process is one of the first of its kind on our grounds.
The first part presents theoretical findings and research results about reading and writing. The empirical part presents results of quantitative research that includes the control and the experimental group (both groups formed with fourth grade pupils). The control group was exposed to normal learning process, while the experimental group was exposed to intensive developing of reading and writing competences for a month in addition to getting to know and use reading and writing strategies. To gain the data, we used a questionnaire, namely a standardized questionnaire about the learning strategies for reading, for which we ourselves have composed a reflection questionnaire about the writing strategies. The pupils of the experimental and the control group filled out the questionnaire twice (at the beginning and the end of the research).
The results confirmed the set hypothesis, and showed that the strategies of reading and writing in average more improved for the pupils that were exposed to additional developing of reading or writing competences than to the pupils that were not exposed. The results also confirmed the hypothesis that the improving of reading strategies positively connects to improving writing strategies and vice versa. The results also showed that female pupils in average have better developed both reading and writing strategies.
|
