Students starting their first year of primary school also enter into a world of developing literacy, i.e. learning to read and write. This lays the foundation for accomplishing the principal objective set out by the Slovenian language course, that is: the effective development of the students’ communicative abilities. Initial or basic literacy, which
must be taught gradually and systematically, is built on the students’ preliteracy skills and the sequential acquisition of the stages of the literacy process. One of the important preliteracy skills is one’s ability to perceive spoken language, i.e. the ability to recognize and segment speech.
Our research dealt with the students’ ability to analyse and interpret speech immediately prior to their introduction to planned literacy. We were interested in whether this pre-existing ability is crucial for their development, and if so whether the significance of this phase is taken into account by teachers during the planning and execution of their (pre)literacy education. We examined how much consideration
teachers give to the development of the students’ speech segmentation abilities and whether students with an underdeveloped sense of literacy are able to read and write
as fluently. For the purposes of this paper, we devised a quantitative study in which students from two first grade classes, enrolled in two separate Slovene primary schools, were asked to complete a set of standardized tests. The study was conducted remotely with each student individually prior to beginning their literacy education proper as well as at the end of May when said students were already expected to have mastered the whole of the uppercase alphabet and were able to read and write whole sentences as well as short texts in uppercase letters. The findings of the two tests were compared internally as well as across the two schools.
We found that students whose teachers took preliteracy and the process of acquiring literacy into consideration when designing their teaching plan demonstrated a better developed ability to segment speech than their counterparts who did not receive such attention, with the former achieving a higher overall average on both tests. While both
groups did attain the expected core competences by the end of May, the students whose level of preliteracy was taken into consideration displayed a more developed ability to segment speech and consequently a higher degree of competence in reading and writing.
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