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The aim of the present study is to monitor the effectiveness of a new conception of early literacy curriculum (in force since September 2016) which provides -- unlike the previous one -- a wide range of purposeful literacy practices and literacy events. The study compares graduates of previous early childhood literacy curriculum (tested in June 2016) with children who attended kindergarten in the years 2016-2019. Several indications of early literacy development were selected especially those that are culturally more sensitive, i.e. are significantly shaped by the social environment offering the broad spectrum of reading experiences. Results show statistically significant relationship of story listening comprehension with comprehension monitoring and narrative production, especially at the level of understanding the implicit meaning. The most profound group differences were found again in narratives and implicit meaning comprehension. On the other hand, no differences were found in indicators of phonemic awareness, comprehension monitoring and understanding the explicit meaning. The results are discussed in terms of their implications to educational practice.

Objectives. The aim of the study is to investigate reading comprehension and metacomprehension as they occur in preschool age in relation to sociocultural environment of the family, in comparison with traditional predictors of beginning reading acquisition represented by several indicators of phonological awareness. Participants and setting. A group of 327 pre-school-age children from middle-SES families and 55 children from low-SES families were compared. Hypotheses. It was assumed that children from low-SES families would perform worse than children from middle-SES families namely in literacy tasks requiring specific social experience with reading, i.e. text comprehension and metacognitive monitoring. Statistical analysis. The differences between the groups were tested using independent samples t-tests, monitoring accuracy on the correct and incorrect answers using the chi-squared test and the relationship between monitoring accuracy and performance in the two text comprehension tasks using 2-way ANO VA. Results. Results showed that children from low-SES families demonstrated significantly lower overall performance in all literacy tasks, however, the group differences in text comprehension varied in relation to the task difficulty (complexity and the level of comprehension). Moreover, in metacognitive monitoring, children from low-SES families showed significantly higher tendency to underestimate their correct performance, indicating lower self-esteem. Study limitations. The main limitation of the study was the lack of information about everyday reading behaviour in children's family environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]