Study On Vocabulary Development Of4-6Uygur Bilingual Children In Urumqi

The status and future development of pre-school bilingual education in Xinjiangrequests a more reliable way to judge the language development of pre-schoolminority bilingual children. Pre-school children are at the initial stage of languagelearning, vocabulary acquisition is the foundation of their language abilities,vocabulary mastery will have an important impact on the future of language andacademic development of pre-school children. That makes the vocabulary mastery asan important criteria to judge the pre-school children’s language progress.This study uses two international general vocabulary test instruments-PeabodyPicture Test (PPVT) and Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT), translate them toUyghur version for study the bilingual receptive and the expressive semanticabilities of pre-school minority children in Xinjiang. The sample included293Uyghur children at the age4-6who studied at bilingual kindergarten in Urumqi,compare their test results with same ages monolingual Han children in Shanghai.The study results reveal the bilingual vocabulary progress level and its regularpattern of the pre-school bilingual children, explore the bilingual vocabularydifferences between children who live and study in different communityenvironment or different educational conditions.The study found that with the age growing, the bilingual children’s vocabulary levelsof both mother tongue and mandarin showed a gradual increase in the trend, and thedevelopment speed significantly accelerate in the stage of5-6years old. Thedevelopment speed of children’s mandarin vocabulary is significantly faster than thedevelopment speed of children’s mother tongue. At the age of6, the expressivevocabulary level of mandarin outdistance the expressive vocabulary level ofchildren’s mother tongue. The vocabulary test scores of Xinjiang pre-schoolbilingual children are significantly lower than the same ages monolingual Hanchildren in Shanghai. This result shows that the pre-school bilingual education canpromote children’s mandarin acquisition, on the other hand, this result also showsthe pre-school bilingual education did not get the expected results on promotechildren’s mother tongue acquisition.The study also found that although pre-school bilingual children live in differentcommunity environment does not show any significantly differences in theirmandarin vocabulary level, there appear a significantly difference in their mothertongue vocabulary level. Because of the better bilingual acquisition opportunitiesand bilingual using environment, pre-school bilingual children who live in ethnicminority areas have a higher level of mother tongue vocabulary than the childrenwho live in multi multiethnic areas. Besides, pre-school bilingual children study indifferent level of kindergartens show a significantly difference in their bilingualvocabulary levels, the higher the kindergarten level is, the higher the children’sbilingual vocabulary levels will be. If the bilingual kindergartens combine theirappropriate language environment creation and the favorable language learningconditions around, they can protect children’s bilingual balanced and promote arapid development for children.