A Study On The Lexical Awareness Development Of EFL Preschool Children Aged 3-7

Lexical awareness is a kind of meta-linguistic abilities. Though the EFL teaching and learning have been quite popular in our country, concerns about the lexical awareness development are limited. The reason is that the development of children’s lexical awareness is in a much implicit way and can seldom reflect obviously on their achievements of the regular tests. In foreign countries, researchers have frequently related the research on the lexical awareness closely to the research on children’s meta-cognitive competence. Also, they have offered instruments for quantitative research on children’s lexical awareness development. The lexical awareness acquisition is different from pure vocabulary learning and it is better reflected on children’s cognitive development. Piaget has promoted in his cognitive development theory that the development of children’s cognitive competence origins basically from their interaction with the environment. The interactions concerning with English are limited for the EFL preschool children, and mainly come from parents and the early English educational institutions. The author has selected 48 students aging from three to seven years old from the Sino-Canadian English kid center as the research subjects. These students are from natural distributed classes. They have been educated with the same English teaching method and under the same English immersion environment. With the theoretical basis of Piaget’s cognitive development theory, the author has chosen age and home literacy environment as two factors, investigating their influences on preschool children’s lexical awareness development in both quantitative and qualitative ways. The research instruments include lexical awareness tests, home literacy environment questionnaire, interview and class observation.Through comparison, the author has come to the conclusions that 1) Lexical awareness of children aging from 3 to 7 develops gradually and continuously; 2) Home literacy environment is a critical factor in predicting children’s lexical awareness development. The interaction activities and physical atmosphere contribute greatly to the influence; 3) Different aspects of lexical awareness develop differently at different ages and it has correlation with children’s cognitive development.The research purposes to investigate the lexical awareness development of EFL preschool children, and have discussed its differences among various ages and home literacy environments. It hopes that the results can lead to a much better recognition of children’s English lexical awareness development and provide reference for policy-making with regard to language learning and teaching in China.