The study focused on reading and writing of pupils began already in the school year 2013/14 with the first graders
The research of the reading and writing skills development among the contemporary pupils in randomly chosen schools in Prague and in the Central Bohemian Region was financially supported, through grants, by the Charles University in Prague (at first by the Faculty of Education and afterwards by the Faculty of Social Sciences). At the very beginning of the study, we were certain we needed to find as homogenous group of children as possible to which we would relate our results. We decided to approach only the parents of children (first graders) who did not have a school postponment and who were growing up in monolinquistic families where only Czech language was used. That is how the issue of potential differences in the language development among children was solved. The children, from whose parents we gained a written consent to join the study, were worked with individually in three approximatelly 25 minutes long sessions. Each session took place in a different day. During those sessions, children were distinquishing sounds and phonems based on the hearing analysis, they recognized letters and numbers, and they did a series of entertaining tasks aimed on important preconditions for a systematic work during subsequent compulsory education.
The first wave of the data collection was planned on September – October 2013. However, a great interest caused prolongization of the work in the field, and therefore, you could have been seeing us on the grounds of elementary schools even until the end of November. That was the reasons, why the previously planned term of the beginning of the second wave of the data collection was reconsidered and postponed (April 2014) as well as the thirds wave of the data collection (April 2015).