Early Readers in Czech

✍ Scribed by Zdenek Matejcek

• Book ID: 101281840
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 125 KB
• Volume: 3
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1076-9242
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0909(199703)3:1<48::aid-dys50>3.0.co;2-s

✦ Synopsis

The phonetic consistency of the spelling system makes reading in Czech relatively easy. As soon as a Czech child learns to pronounce correctly one letter after another, he can read almost any word and any text. Reading speed is the best individual indicator of reading development. One to two per cent of school children are regarded as dyslexic and remedial provision is planned and available for about 4% of the child population. 'Early readers' are defined as those who have learnt to read before 4 years of age. Findings on 76 such children are presented. Four stages of acquisition of reading skill can be distinguished: (i) naming of letters; (ii) discovering letter-sound constant correlation; (iii) latent period of apparently no progress; (iv) synthesizing the sounds and letters into syllables and words (i.e. the processes of coding and decoding). The advance from one stage to another seems to be regular and ordered-extremely accelerated in our 'early readers' and extremely retarded in our dyslexics.