Vera A. Yakupova

The presence of fears in preschoolers is a common problem any practicing psychologist faces in his or her work. In the present study we sought to determine whether a preschooler’s emotional ill-being reflects on the level of cognitive activities and the development of his social competence. The study involved 81 older age preschoolers from Moscow kindergartens. The average age of the girls is 69.2 months; the average age of the boys is 70.7 months. The analysis of the data obtained found no correlations between the amount of fears and the level of cognitive and social development. The data obtained suggests that the amount of fears as such do not affect the level of cognitive and social development, while increased levels of anxiety interfere with the successful cognitive activity of a child.

The article discusses the development of coherent oral speech in preschool age and possible ways to improve it. The author analyzes the terminological variants of the connective oral speech designation, and put forward the terms “narrative” and “text”, that are considered to be synonyms. On the basis of the psycholinguistic data on the peculiarities of the child language acquisition, the authors describe methods for evaluating children’s retelling and narratives, as well as methodological principles for the formation and development of storytelling skills in senior preschool age. It is proposed to evaluate the parameters of their micro- and macrostructure in children’s narratives. The microstructure is traditionally referred to lexical and grammatical indicators: the number of lexical and grammatical errors, the richness of the dictionary, syntactic complexity, the absence of omissions of major parts of the sentence, pronominalizations index, and others. The macrostructure includes the correspondence to the simplest narrative structure “goal – action – result” and the degree of development of the narrative (complete, simplified or distorted narrative). When learning to create narratives, child needs to move from simpler, personal narratives to more complex, invented ones. Personal narratives include children’s stories about repeated actions or events, and at a later stage – about a bright, memorable event for the child. Fictional narratives are often created using one or a series of images. A story is usually created based on a series of images, and a description is created based on a single image. Among the fictional narratives, stories will be simpler for children than descriptions. Work on creating texts with children should be based on a series of colorful, interesting images, where you can trace temporary and cause-and-effect relationships. It is concluded that learning vocabulary and grammar is not enough for the development of coherent oral speech; special techniques are needed to develop children’s ability to generate text as an integral and coherent unity.