Abstract
Pupils come into elementary school with naturally developed verbal skills from earlier age. It is essential for education to make the children use their experiences in creating generally applicable language principles, particularly those, which apply in teaching the Czech language.
This chapter of the collective monograph deals with observation of the preconceptions in Czech language as a basis for the application of the constructivist approaches in teaching Czech language. Its aim is to start exploring pupils' preconceptions in the language system.
It deals with what preconceptions are and how the level of cognitive and linguistic development of the child affect them. It also draws attention towards the difficulties in exploring children's ideas and outlines possible methods of their examination.
It also deals with non-verbal diagnostic methods of recognizing pre-concepts of language (game, drawing etc.) and verbal methods (story-telling, dialogue) which can become essential for research in this area.