Study On The Conversational Ability Of Children Aged 4-5 Years

Conversation is an important part of oral language ability for preschool children, and an important way for children to communication as well. The guideline of learning and developing for children aged 3-6 points out that children's language abilities are developed in the processes of communication and utilization, and therefore adults should provide a relatively free and vivid language environment for children and children should be encouraged to talk not only to parents but also to peers. Apparently, at the early period of preschool education, both parents and peers play an important role in the development of children's conversation skills. Then, does it have any differences about the conversation ability between child-adult and child-peer? And do the differences have significant effect on children's conversation ability? The answer cannot be found from previous studies. Therefore, based on the review of existent studies, we chose 30 children who have the similar family educational background and intelligence level in the second grade in kindergarten from N-City as the object of this research, and collected their conversation with their mothers and peers respectively. After transcribing the video and coding the data, we analyze in detail under the instruction of Snow's framework from four aspects, including turn-taking ability, conversation-initiating ability, conversation-maintaining ability, and conversation-repairing ability. Finally, the research draws to following conclusions:(1) There exists consistency for the development of conversation ability when children aged 4-5 years interact with adults and peers. Specific consistencies are including: the overall development trend of the conversational ability, the types of conversation initiating style and conversation maintaining style, the core communication tendency type and core speech act during conversation initiating and conversation maintaining, children's conversation-repairing abilities are very immature when they interact with adults and peers.(2) There exists discrepancy for the development of conversation ability when children aged 4-5years interact with parents and peers. Specific differences are including: the development of turn-taking ability, the development of conversation initiating and conversation maintaining ability, the preference of communication tendency types and speech acts during conversation initiating and conversation maintaining, conversation-repair request.(3) Based on the differences and the datas, we discuss the different influences about adult and peer on children's conversation ability. The influence of adults for the development of children's conversation ability mainly embodied in the following aspects: turn-taking ability, conversation-maintenance ability, conversation correlation and narrative language. The influence of peers for the development of children's conversation ability mainly manifested in:conversation-initiating ability, conversation-repairing ability, more complex and longer utterances outputing, imagination expressing, decentralism speech and negative speech development.According to above research, we suggest to preschool education workers and parents that in order to improve children's conversation ability, the following should be achieved: (1) Give full play to the role of adults in the development of children's turn-taking ability, conversation-maintenance ability, conversation content relevance and narrative language. (2) Attention also should be paid to the role of peers in the development of children's conversation-iniating ability, conversation-repairing, the plenty of speech acts and. (3) Make full use of kindergarten as the combining point for parents and peers to support the development of children's conversation ability by the teacher's guiding in the non-collective teaching activities and building conversation station.