The Future of Education
Analysis of Children's Conceptions of Reading, Writing and Counting
Milena Lipnická, University Matej Bel Banská Bystrica, Slovak Republic (Slovakia)
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to describe and interpret children's conceptions of the concepts of reading, writing and counting through a qualitative approach. The phenomenological analysis allowed to identify themes that are typical for the ideas about the meaning of the concepts of reading, writing and counting in a selected group of children (Koutná Kostínková and Čermák, 2013). In individual interviews, eight children aged five to six answered the following questions: descriptive 'What is it? ', applicative 'What is it for?", evaluative 'What would it be if it wasn't? ' and about the source of knowledge ' How do you know?'. The questions were situationally refined and developed in the interviews to be as telling as possible about the unique experiences (Babiaková, 2019). Analysis of the interview transcripts was conducted by first formulating themes for each child separately and then for the whole group. Subsequently, clusters of superordinate and subordinate themes were formed based on the gradual discovery of relationships and their graphical representation. The superordinate themes of the concept of reading were books, information and learning. For the concept of writing these were letters, mobile, drawing and for the concept of counting these were writing numbers, counting something and wisdom. The subthemes of the concept of reading were listening to stories, looking at books and learning in school. The sub-themes for the concept of writing focused on drawing, writing letters, and names. The sub-themes for the concept of counting focused on numbers in books, counting with fingers, saying numbers in order. Conceptualizations suggest that children talked about these processes based on sensory and practical experiences (Bloom, 2015). These findings may be beneficial for adapting preschool content to children's conceptual learning opportunities.
Keywords: children's preconceptions, phenomenological analysis, reading, writing, counting.
REFERENCES
[1] Babiaková, S. (2016). Language and literacy concepts in children's preconceptions. In: Children on the threshold of education. Reasons and possibilities for their exploration. Belianum.
[2] Bloom, P. (2015). How children learn the meaning of words. Karolinum.
[3] Koutná Kostínková, J. & Čermák, I. (2013). Interpretive phenomenological analysis. In: Qualitative text analysis: four approaches. MUNI Press.
