Kyuchukov H.S., Ushakova O.S. Pragmatic Aspects of Татаr-Russian Bilingualism among Preschool Children
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Abstract
This article presents the linguistic and narrative development of Tatar-Russian bilingual children. The issues of narrative development in Tatar-Russian bilingual preschool children have not been investigated so far, and this is the first attempt to analyze children’s abilities to construct narratives in both languages.
The aim of the work is to analyze the narratives of Tatar-Russian bilingual children and to show their lexical richness using the ratio of lexeme types (TTR) and average sentence length in the narratives. Thus, we plan to find out which language is dominant in bilingual children.
The study involved 2 groups of children aged 4–5 and 5–6 (10 children in each group) who had to compose narratives in both languages – Tatar as a native language and Russian as a second language – by looking at two series of pictures. The total number of stories analyzed was 40 – 20 in Russian and 20 in Tatar. The Tatar language was tested by a native speaker – teacher of a Tatar language at the kindergarten and the testing in Russian was done by one of the authors who is Russian speaking. All the narratives were recorded, transcribed and analyzed in both languages.
Results showed that the children have Russian as a dominant language. However, often narrating in Russian the children were using Tatar words, which show that their vocabulary is not so rich. The knowledge of the children in Tatar language is limited. They vocabulary and the number of sentences per story were limited.
The study, although limited, gives us an inside view the pragmatic aspect of the language of the Tatar -Russian bilingual children. In order to develop balanced bilingualism among the children it is not enough to have few hours lessons in the kindergarten. It is known that the development of the narrative abilities by children in generally is a good bridge to their literacy in primary classes. It is important their narrative abilities to be developed in both languages. Some American and European researchers found out recently that parents reading books in the mother tongue of bilingual children helps them to acquire the literacy in their second language.
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