The level of reading literacy in pupils at the end of the first grade of elementary school

Starting school changes the child’s previous way of life, social position, and activities. The child
learns to be a schoolchild, and by means of appropriate teaching methods moves from the area
of games to the area of learning and acquires new competencies. Reading, which in principle is
understanding the characters of written speech, whether printed or handwritten, is one of the
two components of human literacy. In the process of learning, these two components act jointly
on a principle that could be simply described as a process from the meaning to the character,
and from the character to the meaning. A child who is writing moves the meaning directly to
the characters (encoding); a child who is reading picks the meaning from these characters
(decoding). These cognitive abilities need to be learned. The process of reading and writing
is a complex cognitive process that consists of many sub-processes, which gradually become
automatic during the process of learning.
This fact inspired us to perform a deeper analysis to identify which reading competences
pupils have after one year of study at elementary school. In the research, the main objective
of which was to identify and evaluate the level of reading literacy in children at the end of the
fi rst grade of elementary school, the authors considered the fact that in Czech schools, the
training of elementary reading uses the principles of three basic methods: analytical-synthetic,
genetic, and Sfumato blended reading. The research method was a non-standardized achievement test which focused on various components of reading literacy. The research involved
a total of 341 children, of whom 287 were taught using the analytical-synthetic method, 24 by
the genetic method, and 30 by the Sfumato blended reading method. The data was interpreted
with respect to the research variables; the results were discussed in the context of education
in elementary schools.