Social aspects of reading literacy with an emphasis on children from a socially disadvantaged environment in Slovakia

Abstract

Reading literacy as functional literacy, i.e. the ability to understand and use written text, is alarming for students from disadvantaged backgrounds in Slovakia. In relation to children from less favourable backgrounds, the Slovak education system has long been unable to adequately compensate for educational inequalities determined by social origin. The most important stimuli affect children before they enter primary school. The study presents selected research on supporting child readers within the context of the family, based mainly on foreign sources, where this research has a rich tradition. Factors in the so-called home literacy environment, especially reading together or so-called dialogic reading of a parent with a child, as well as the size of the family library, were identified as particularly important. At the end of the paper, the possibilities of socio-pedagogical intervention are outlined.

Keywords

• reading literacy
• home literacy environment
• dialogic reading