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The article discusses the relevance of the problem of children’s speech readiness for schooling, including the development of language and communication abilities of preschool children. It is shown that the transition from kindergarten to school is associated with a change in the social status of a child who becomes a pupil. This is preceded by a huge preparatory work that develops general and special preparation for learning at school, which should result in readiness for school, including speech. The authors consider the cognitive aspect of preschool children’s speech readiness for school. It is shown that the study of the correlation between thought, speech and language in the formation of a preschool child’s personality provides opportunities to identify patterns of development of intellectual, communicative, speech and language abilities in preschool childhood. Language (linguistic) competence in relation to preschoolers is considered as an elementary awareness of the phenomena and facts of language and speech, the formation of the ability to use words, their forms and syntactic structures in accordance with the norms of the literary language, to use synonymic and antonymic resources of the native language. The tasks of the development of linguistic and communicative abilities are presented. The development of all aspects of speech, knowledge of the rules and norms of speech etiquette, and their use, depending on the situation, play an important role in educating the culture of speech communication among preschoolers. The improvement of communicative competence is impossible without learning the basics of speech culture, the absence of which can cause a misconception about the essence of the statement. The prospects of research on the formation of speech readiness for school education are outlined. The conclusions summarize the main points of the article.

Goal-setting. The paper focuses on narrative abilities of preschool children as a resource for their cognitive development. Considering the speech and language development by children applies Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach. The development is viewed as a dialectical process: development is considered not as a gradual growth, but as a series of qualitative transformations. The study emphasizes two statements from Lev Vygotsky’s analysis: first, the idea of the genetic connection of telling (and drawing) stories with the future learning of reading and writing; second, the idea of connection between figurative and verbal means of creating narratives at the preschool age. Lev Vygotsky’s ideas were considered in relation with current studies on children’s narrative abilities.

Procedure and Methods. The paper describes the study on connection between the structure of children’s narratives and the dialectical thinking of preschoolers.

Applied methods: “What can be at the same time?” (N.Veraksa); “What can be the other way round?)” (A. Belolutskaya); “Children’s test of cyclic representations” (N. Veraksa, S. Senyukova), “Tell a story” (A. Mak Keib). The study involved 34 children aged from five years to six years and eleven months. Each child was studied individually to avoid the influence of other children on the content of the story. A study on the method “Compilation of history using a dialectical pattern” (I. B. Shiyan) involving 44 senior preschool children (5 – 6.5 years of age) has been conducted. Children were asked to invent their own story (based on imagination or describing real events that happened to the child) using a dialectical pattern (beginning, middle, end) or without using one.

Results and Conclusion. The connection with the success of dialectical approach was detected only for stories based on the pattern. The study came to conclusion that using the “beginning, end, middle” storytelling pattern encourages children to create a more complex narrative, including operating with opposites. The creation of narratives can be used as a resource of cognitive development, in particular development of dialectical thinking in senior preschool children.

The article presents the results of a study into the structure of metacognition in preschool years. The methods used included metacognitive conversation and experiments. The experiment consisted of introducing a problem situation, discussing a plan of action with a child, implementing the plan, summing up the results. A total of 80 children of 4-7 years were surveyed. It was shown that preschool age is a sensitive period for children’s metacognitive development, with the age of 5-6 years being the most significant one. When in their senior preschool age kids begin to form a dialectic understanding of cognitive activity as a dynamic system which includes conflicting characteristics. 5-7 year-old children are able to set themselves a dialectic task aiming to perceive the specific properties of an object, its relationships with surrounding objects and possible directions of development. Older preschoolers are in a position to identify possible educational tools based on internal and external factors, and to draw up long-term programs of logical actions that involve different options for problem solving. They also display elements of meaningful self-control.

Relevance of the article. Studies aimed at studying the cognitive aspect of the development of language ability in preschoolers show that the center of the development of language ability is the semantic component that underlies the linguistic development of a preschool child, which includes not only expanding the vocabulary, but also educating children to pay attention to the content of the word, its semantics, enriching connections with other words, because in monologue speech, the meaning of a single word interacts with the semantics of the entire utterance. The formation of coherent monological speech is the central task of the speech development of a preschooler. The work on the meaning of the word, the expansion of the semantic field, the use of the associative principle of vocabulary assimilation, the formation of linguistic generalizations in the assimilation of the grammatical structure of speech develop in preschoolers the arbitrariness and awareness of speech, the ability to sel ect accurate and expressive means when constructing coherent utterances of different types. These provisions apply to mastering not only the native language, but also any other language.

The aim of the study. To summarize the results of research conducted for more than twenty years in the kindergarten No. 215 (then – the preschool department of school No. 324 in Moscow).

Progress of the study. The research conducted under the leadership of F.A. Sokhin, O.S. Ushakova, V.I. Yashina was aimed at developing the theory of language acquisition in preschool childhood, organically combining pedagogical, psychological and linguistic aspects in theoretical analysis and experiment. These studies have shown that children, starting from the younger preschool age, show great interest in language reality, “experiment” with words, create new words, focusing on both the semantic and grammatical side of the language. A necessary condition for their linguistic development is a gradual awareness of linguistic phenomena, i.e. the development of children’s metalanguage activity, which leads to a genuine mastery of the richness of the language.

The research results also showed that enriching the dictionary includes not only expanding its scope, but also educating children to pay attention to the content of the word, its semantics, clarifying the meanings of words, expanding the connections of the word with other words. Along with the semantic side of the word, the problem of lexical compatibility of words also plays an important role, which makes it possible to close the mastery of the semantics of the word with the development of coherent speech.

Conclusions. The formation of elementary awareness of the phenomena of language and speech is one of the most important tasks of both speech and linguistic development, starting fr om preschool age, therefore, we consider this aspect to be central in the initial development of a linguistic personality and understanding the meaning of a word, which is the basic unit of language and the basis of a child’s cognitive development, determines the essence of the development of his language ability.