Literacy is defined as the ability to understand and use those written forms that are important in a particular society and for individuals. The concept of early stages of literacy is defined as the first part of a lengthy process of learning how to read and write. Pre-writing skills that each child shows are crucial for initial literacy as well for the further development of reading and writing. The key factors that influence the development of reading and writing are children's cognitive abilities, visual and auditory memory as well as speech and phonological awareness.
Each child has different pre-literacy skills when entering the process of literacy, especially when it comes to children with moderate intellectual disability who are different from their peers with typical development in these areas. These children often have weak phonological awareness, weak vocabulary and problems with language comprehension (also as a result of other factors, such as memory problems and short-term attention). As a result, reading development is slowed down. Reading and writing of children with moderate intellectual disability is therefore adjusted due to specific differences in pre-writing skills, but we still need to follow the developmental stages of the learning process. The first stage in the process of learning how to read and write is the so-called logographic stage from which the logographic method of literacy is derived. This method follows the assumption that a child starts reading words as a visual whole, eventually learning to read the words like an image. The choice of words is individually adjusted to the specific child and their needs and for this reason, this literacy method is appropriate for children with moderate intellectual disabilities.
In this master’s thesis we wanted to establish a link between four pre-writing skills and the effectiveness of the logographic method of initial literacy in children with moderate intellectual disabilities. We selected five children who attend Level 1 of the special education programme for the purpose of the research. We performed an overview of pre-writing skills of the children involved in the beginning of March. Later, from March to June, we performed a logographic programme of early initial literacy. At the end of the programme, the number of words obtained through this method was analysed in the light of pre-writing skills that children showed at the first meetings. The results showed that there are some differences between the number of words obtained for the children involved. However, we could not establish any reliable connections between the number of words acquired through the logographic method of initial literacy and the showed pre-writing skills. The connection between visible memory and differentiation and the number of words acquired is indicated, but it should be further explored in order to confirm it.
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