| Abstrakt: |
The written Latvian language is a very transparent orthography which traditionally has led to very lax instruction of reading - it is assumed that as soon as a student knows the letters, he/she can read (a connected text). Though, the morphology in Latvian is very complex and could make reading in Latvian more difficult than predicted by the transparent orthography. During soviet times there was a formal though brief and inconsistent direct training in reading in 1 st grade, but it was abandoned when Latvia created its first re-independent state education standard. Regardless of that, Latvia has fared comparatively well on 4 th grade international PIRLS reading tests. But, when 15-year-old students are tested in OECD PISA reading tests, we see that student skills have declined. This has suggested for a long time that reading instruction as it was, was not effective in the long run. The research on reading fluency and typology of mistakes conducted in academic year 2022/2023 for 4 th grade students of Latvia demonstrates that many students fail to reach reading fluency age/grade norm. Apart from the absolute low numbers of reading fluency another alarming tendency is that students in the 10 th and 25 the percentiles progress significantly slower than their peers reading in 75 th and 90 the percentile. The most common mistakes are reading phonetically and morphologically difficult/long words (consisting of 3 and more syllables) and understanding indirect/metaphoric meanings of expressions in literary text. These findings bring us to a conclusion that Latvia urgently needs to bring explicit reading instruction back to primary grades and develop remedial reading programmes for those students who learn reading slower than their peers. Another task of our educational system is to develop data based levelled reading methodologies and, while striving to improve reading fluency of around 45% of poor readers, also develop compensation for insufficient reading ability - audio and multimedia textbooks and study materials not to deprive many students of academic content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
