The paper presents a portion of the results obtained in the first phase of a longitudinal study of the development of children?s literacy. The aim of the research was to study the level of development of phonological skills in preschool children. The development of phonological skills, as part of metalinguistic skills, was studied by the assessment of voice analysis and synthesis in words and recognising rhyme. The sample included preschool children. The obtained results have pointed to an average development of children?s phonological skills in the domain of the ability of voice synthesis and analysis in words, as well as to the difficulties in solving items that contained more complex demands of manipulating phonemes within words. It was also determined that there were difficulties in recognising rhyme in words where phonological similarity was more prominent on the level of the whole word. Since there are very few research studies in our country that deal with the development of phonological skills in preschool children, which are an important predictor for the acquisition of reading and writing skills, the findings of this research can provide an insight into the development of this aspect of children?s speech and language, while in the long run they would enable us to observe the influence of this predictor on the success in initial reading and writing. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 179034: Od podsticanja inicijative, saradnje, stvaralastva u obrazovanju do novih uloga i identiteta u drustvu i br. 47008: Unapredjivanje kvaliteta i dostupnosti obrazovanja u procesima modernizacije Srbije]
The ability to understand the meaning of words and sentences is an important determinant of the language development, which also indicates the development of the ability to learn. Bearing this in mind, the research was aimed at studying the level of semantic development of younger primary school-age children. Semantic development was studied from the aspect of understanding the meaning of words and their use in the following lexical relations: homonyms, antonyms, synonyms and metonyms. The research was conducted in three Belgrade primary schools during the school year 2013/2014. The sample was convenient and included 431 second- and third-grade pupils. The Semantic test (by S. Vladisavljevic) was used in the study. Research results showed that none of the pupils had provided the correct answer to all administered tasks. The best scores were achieved on the part of the test referring to antonyms, while the pupils were least successful on the tasks referring to metonyms. Additionally, third-grade pupils were more successful than younger participants, while there were no differences according to gender. The results indicated that it was necessary to devote more attention to different lexical and semantic exercises at preschool and early school age, considering the link between semantic development, the acquisition of reading and writing skills and the (un)successful mastering of the school curriculum in the majority of subjects.
Reading habits are an essential aspect for creating a functionally literate society and for its positioning at the global level. In this regard, the aim of this paper is to examine quantities and contents that high school students read, including compulsory reading and other books that do not belong to this corpus. We also tried to examine students? opinions about ways that could contribute to their motivation to read books, to consider their reading habits keeping in mind the family context and the use of library services, as well as to determine whether reading books is related to gender, academic achievement, the type of school that the students attend, the class and the education of their parents. Students (N=1378) from high schools and secondary vocational schools from several cities in Serbia participated in the research. A questionnaire was used, constructed for the purposes of this study. The results show that adolescents are reluctant to read reading materials contained in the curriculum. The majority of students read books outside of this corpus, and they most often read comics, science fiction, crime and romance novels. More than one fifth of students do not recognise any way that would motivate them to read books. Since there has been no visible improvement in this area in teaching practice over the last decade, it would be desirable to introduce and affirm optional subjects that would contribute to improving the reading habits of high school students (especially in secondary vocational schools). [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 451-03-68/2020-14/200018]
This paper presents the results of the research of peculiarities of syntactic development, as an element of language structure on the grammatical level of children suffering from developmental dysphasia, after the completed speech pathology treatment of many years. Syntactic level at younger school age was studied by assessing language competence in the accomplishment of communicative sentence with subordinate clause. The research was performed on the samples of children at school age in regular primary schools in Belgrade. The sample comprised 160 respondents who were divided in two groups: target and comparative. The target group consisted of 60 respondents (children suffering from developmental dysphasia after the completed speech pathology treatment of many years), and the comparative group consisted of 100 respondents from regular primary school "Gavrilo Princip" in Zemun. Research results show that grammatical development of children suffering from developmental dysphasia takes place at a considerably slower rate and entails substantially more difficulties in accomplishing predication in subordinate clauses. This paper discusses the consequences which the difficulties in grammatical development can have on school achievement
A significant and insufficiently studied problem in the education in our country is the quality of textbook language. It is vital to address the issue from students? perspective (to whom this teaching aid is primarily intended), which, among other things, enables to analyse whether the textbook presents the support for students to learn, but also to examine the extent to which the textbook can help students improve their basic abilities, primarily linguistic and cognitive. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine how fifth graders understand the language of mathematics textbooks. Students (N = 209) of the said age from three Belgrade primary schools participated in the research. The students were asked to mark language units whose meaning they did not understand in two lessons (studied and nonstudied) in mathematics textbooks. The results indicate that there are several types of linguistic units that students evaluate as incomprehensible: words, syntagms, and sentences. They also reveal that the students understand better the language of familiar than that of unfamiliar lesson, which indicates that they would not be able to master the knowledge from these textbooks independently. In the familiar lesson, significantly more students do not understand words and syntagms belonging to general lexical system of Serbian language. In the unfamiliar lesson, however, significant percentage of students does not understand meanings of the sentences used (seven sentences in average). The students with a better grade in mathematics marked fewer unclear sentences in both familiar and unfamiliar lesson. The obtained results could be used in improving the quality of the language in mathematics textbooks, as well as in raising students? language competence.
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