Abstract
The number of foreign pupils in Czech primary schools increases. They are not spread out evenly but they are chiefly present in Prague where they represented more than 6 % of all primary school pupils.
While in some districts there are practically no foreigners in primary schools, in other districts the share of foreigners exceeds 10 %. Interviews with teachers proved that schools considered the integration of foreign pupils in Czech schools as a problem.
The key issue is inadequacy of the funding system for work with foreigners and the lack of training of the teachers for this role. In order to help to facilitate the integration of foreign pupils into school the research team developed a diagnostic test for foreign pupils that assessed the level of knowledge of the children in four language skills: reading comprehension, listening comprehension, written text and verbal communication.
The pilot study using the diagnostic test on the sample of 153 pupils from Prague primary schools shed light on factors that influence the process of language acquisition. The most important factor is the length of stay in the Czech Republic.
The relationship between length of stay in the country and the level of knowledge of the Czech language is not linear. As the length of stay in the country increases, the knowledge of Czech first improves very quickly, it then slows down and doesn’t progress so fast.
With each added year of stay in the Czech Republic, the initially strong differences between various groups disappear. The test results show that the process of learning Czech is significantly influenced by the ethnicity: children of Asian origin had virtually no knowledge at all of Czech upon arrival to the Czech Republic and they needed more time to obtain at least basic language skills than students from Slavic countries, who were learning Czech at first very quickly.
However, the differences between children of various ethnic origins progressively diminished over time.