Abstract:

The initial phases of teaching the reading and writing are primarily focused on technical accuracy and fluency. Even though the teaching of reading and writing begins in the first grade of primary school, the task of kindergartens is to prepare children to master all the activities that are a precondition of the subsequent acquisition of reading and writing. The paper discusses the synthetic activities at the word, syllable and phoneme level which are in Slovakia the basis for the teaching of reading and writing using the sound based analytical-synthetic method. This theoretical-empirical study first presents some theoretical issues connected with the topic, then it focuses on the results acquired from children in the preschool age in Slovakia. The research was conducted with 866 respondents at the age of four to seven years. It was focused on children´s ability to synthesize sounds into the words, i.e. create a word from isolated phonemes. The results are part of a more extensive research focused on the development of a complex tool used to evaluate the level of phonemic awareness. The paper is the outcome of the VEGA project no. 1/0637/16 entitled The Development of the Diagnostic Instrument for the Assessment of the Level of Phonemic Awareness of Preschool Age Children.

Keywords:

Hearing analysis, hearing synthesis, sound analytical-synthetic method, phonemic awareness, sound, phoneme, word.