Podsticanje razvoja čitalačkih kompetencija: mogućnosti i ograničenja bukvara

Abstract

Reading comprehension represents a basis for the literacy competencies. This paper focused on a primer textbook as the first textbook that students encounter with and attempted to define in what way and to what extent they help the development of reading comprehension. More specifically, the main goal of this study was to determine what are the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the exercises, instructions and other information which follow the texts and facilitate the development of literacy competencies in children who are at the beginner level of reading. We have analyzed texts with affirmed authorship from seven primer textbooks, published in the last ten years. The first level of the analysis established what were the different types of instructions and exercises, as well as what was their distribution. The second level of the analysis went into more detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the texts that were published in each primer textbook, in order to determine what were the different strategies that publishers used for the construction of following categories: questions about the text, dictionary behind the text, lexical-semantic exercises, as well as additional instructions. Results indicated that instructions and exercises which could potentially facilitate the development of reading comprehension were present in the primer textbooks for Serbian, but that their distribution was scares and nonsystematic. These findings were discussed in the context of the previous studies about the textbooks for lower grades for Serbian language, as well as within the context of the current theories about reading comprehension and literacy.