Development Of Conversational Skills For Children Aged From Three To Six In Peer Interaction

Conversation is a main form of peer interaction among children. The period from three to six years old is an important phase for children learn to communicate and interact with peers. Conversational skill has great influence on carrying out activities building up relationship with their peers. It is also a significant component of children's pragmatic competence. Therefore, increasing attention has been paid to conversational skill development in young children. Although conversational skills have been studied from turn-taking, topic invitation, continuation and conversation repair in the international child language research field, little has been known about Chinese children's conversational skill development, especially in the children's peer interaction.By using the framework of overseas study, this study aims to explore children's pragmatic development from four aspects: turn-taking, topic invitation, continuation and repair in children aged from 3 to 6 years under the context of peer interaction. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods has been used to test the development of conversational skills of Chinese children. Cross-sectional information collected from the video of semi-structure dyad interaction was coded by both user-defined conversation coding format and Inventory of Communicative Acts-Abridged (INCA-A). Qualitative analysis is used to explain the results from the quantitative analysis and reveal the specific process of children's conversational skill development.The results demonstrate that children's competence of turn-taking, topic invitation, continuation and repair improve with age, which is the same case with that of foreign children. Therefore, the study confirm that the four aspects are important components of Chinese children's conversational skills. The study also indicates that there is a close connection between children's conversation skills and cognitive ability development. Moreover, some common verbal characteristics of preschool children in the context peer interaction have been revealed as well, that is, children are unsuccessful initiators, inexperienced repairer but good continuators in conversation. Last but not least, the special "imaginative" communication space and "passive" communication atmosphere during peer interaction create particular opportunities for the growth of children's conversational skills.