The Effect Of Family Background On The Vocabulary Level Of Children Aged 5-6 Years

According to The guideline of learning and developing for children aged 3-6,children's language education requires the closely cooperation of family and kindergarten. Family as children's main living environment also has a subtle influence on children's language development. Moreover, family background reflects the whole situation of family. Children also need to accumulate vocabularies which are the foundation of language. Then, how is the relationship between family background and children's vocabulary development? Based on the review of existing studies, the author found that the previous researchers had different definitions and classifications of family background which caused different conclusions and a lack of comparability.At the same time, the studies usually paid attention to one or several aspects of family background which were not comprehensive. As a consequence, the author divided family background into economic capital, social capital and cultural capital based on the sociological theory. Then the author investigated the vocabulary ability and family background of 252 children aged 5 to 6 and use some statistical analysis methods to explore the relationship between family background and children's vocabulary ability,such as one way ANOVA, correlation analysis, regression analysis and path analysis.Finally, the conclusions of this study were as follows:(1)The vocabulary ability of children from different family background is quite different. Children's vocabulary ability from the better family background is significantly higher than those from the worse family background. The overall family background has significant effects on children's vocabulary ability.(2)Family economic capital, social capital and cultural capital all deeply influence children's vocabulary ability. The influence of cultural capital is the greatest while social capital is the weakest.(3)The dimensions of family cultural capital have different influence modes on children's ability. The home cultural environment, parenting pattern, and parental educational belief mainly have direct influences while parental educational level has indirect effects through influencing the home cultural environment, parenting pattern,and parental belief. The influence of family cultural environment is the greatest,followed by parental belief, parenting pattern and parental educational level.(4)Among all variables of family cultural capital, family cultural activities,warm parenting, positive educational belief and family language environment positively influence children's vocabulary ability,but unemotional parenting and negative educational belief cause negative effects. Family cultural activities have the greatest influence on children's vocabulary ability.According to the above conclusions, the author provided some suggestions for parents to improve children's vocabulary ability:(1)Enrich the family cultural activities and guide children to talk about different activities experience; (2)Increase the frequency of parent-child reading and raise the quality of reading interaction; (3)Create the mandarin language environment and improve the quality of parents' language; (4)Improve the family parenting patterns and create a positive response environment.