Abstract:

The symptoms of specific language impairment (SLI) and the manifestations of specific learning disabilities (SLD), especially dyslexia and dysgraphia, are frequent factors that have a negative effect on the success of the education of pupils at the elementary level of compulsory schooling. The presented study is based on findings about the key role that reading comprehension plays in students' acquisition of new knowledge. It is focused on the evaluation of decoding, understanding of heard sentences and understanding of explicit and implicit meanings in read sentence forms in pupils diagnosed with SLI and suspected development towards SLD.

The research group consisted of 14 pupils in the 3rd year of elementary school, with an average age of 9.5 years, who were diagnosed with SLI. All of these pupils had support measures in place for pupils with specific educational needs and at the time of the research investigation (11/2022 - 01/2023) they showed suspicion of the development of a specific learning disorder as part of special pedagogical diagnostics.

In the course of the research, a statistically significant correlation was found between the comprehension of heard sentences and subsequent sentence forms in reading and confirmed the need for coordination of special pedagogical and clinical-logopaedic diagnostics in the diagnosis of the coexistence of SLI and SLD in pupils in the initial years of compulsory schooling.

The achieved results confirm the fact that pupils with SLI and suspected development of manifestations towards SLD - lag behind in the development of comprehension, are less able to use the present morphological key forms of sentences and remain at the level of difficulties arising from deficits in morphology, semantics, grammar and language sensitivity, which are present in children with SLI in preschool age. These persistent deficits are subsequently transformed at school age into sentence comprehension disorders and, as a result, into difficulties in understanding the implicit meanings of the read text.

The achieved results of the research study predict the importance and need for interdisciplinary diagnostics and, above all, the development of interdisciplinary cooperation of school, counselling and clinical workplaces in the development of a therapeutic and educational program for children with the coexistence of SLI and SLD in the compulsory school attendance program.

Keywords:

Specific language impairment, specific learning disabilities, heard sentences, compulsory school attendance program, interdisciplinary diagnostics.