Abstract
Rationale: Even that it may be surprising, some European countries still did not have a chance to produce a research to fully describe development of reading skills (both decoding and comprehension) in their school populations. This is the case of Czech Republic, where children learn to read and spell in Czech using two competing teaching methods: phonics and whole word in transparent language(Caravolas 2004).
Only few studies published internationally describe development of reading in Czech: e.g. Caravolas, Volín, Hulme 2005 worked with children from 2nd to 5th grade in various phoneme awareness, reading and spelling tasks , Caravolas, et al (in press) described development of beginning reading at the onset of formal schooling in 4 languages including Czech.
However there is no study with Czech samples describing development of reading (both decoding and comprehension) during the beginning 4 years in primary school. We would like to present first data from cross-sectional and semi-longitudinal study of decoding and reading comprehension skills in Czech, where we collect the data from children across 4 beginning years in Czech primary school (in 2data collection rounds).
Method: 400 children from 4 beginning grades were assessed on: reading fluency, silent reading, various reading comprehension and listening comprehension, verbal skills, grammatical and phonological skills and RAN. Cohorts per each grade consisted of 50 children learning by phonic and 50 learning whole word methodcomprehension, verbal skills, grammatical and phonological skills and RAN.
Cohorts per each grade consisted of 50 children learning by phonic and 50 learning whole word method. Results: Our study is now in progress waiting for the end of the first phase of the data collection.
In the data analyses, we plan to concentrate on a description of variability in reading skills according to teaching methods and according to school age.