ASSESMENT OF PRELITEARACY COMPETENCE IN CHILDREN AGED 5-7 AND EARLY READING ABILITIES

Several authors claim that literacy competences and early reading abilities are correlated. Following the example of foreign and domestic established instruments or tools, developed to assess the preliteracy competence of children aged 5-7, a new Slovenian test of preliteracy competence (PPZ) have been developed. In this study we analyze the correlations between the early reading abilities, assessed with the test of early reading abilities (Jurišić, 2001), and the preliteracy competence, assessed with the instrument PPZ. The analysis was conducted on 307 children aged 5 to 7. The regression analysis showed that the abilities of phoneme deletion, identification of the first sound, phoneme analysis, recalling the words on a certain phoneme and the ability to discriminate similar phonemes gave the greatest predictive values for success in early reading abilities.