2021, 5

In this issue of the journal, we present the international experience in the study of narratives in preschool children. The authors of the articles live and work in different European countries (Bulgaria, Poland, Finland, Sweden and Russia). All publications are grouped around the same topic of the story of children in a monolingual or bilingual situation.

The article discusses the factors that affect the development of speech in older preschool children, and the place the educational environment takes in this process. A brief overview of the history of the concept of educational environment in Russian and foreign pedagogy and educational psychology is given.

Aim of the study. The method of assessing the educational environment CLASS is considered, such a component of the CLASS methodic as methodological support is analyzed. On the other hand, the authors give a brief description of the child’s language development up to the senior preschool age and conclude that for the most effective assessment of speech development at this age, it is necessary to use elicited narratives (that is, stories told by the child based on a series of pictures). The literature overview of the interrelations between the educational environment quality and the child’s speech development showed that contradictory data were obtained. The hypothesis of this study was the assumption that such a parameter of the educational environment as Methodological support would affect the development of speech in older preschool children.

Sample. The study involved 261 preschoolers (49,4% of boys) aged 5–6 years, pupils of 26 senior groups of kindergartens in Moscow. To test the hypothesis, two groups of preschool educational institutions were identified using the Mann-Whitney test: with high and low quality of methodological support, and then, using ANOVA, the speech parameters of children from these two groups were compared.

Results. As a result of the study, for the first time in the Russian sample, the results were obtained that well-organized methodological support in a preschool educational institution contributes to the better development of both lexical and grammatical indicators of speech and the ability to compose a coherent statement (narrative). The article draws conclusions both about the limitations of the conducted study and about possible ways for further research.

The relevance of the topic of the article. Each period has its own significance for the upbringing, socialization and education of the future of the nation - children, but preschool education occupies a special place. It sets the stage for building ideas, relationships, and competencies. The development of connected speech during this period is a priority in the work of a preschool teacher who is looking for working methods that are adequate to the modern development of technologies.

The aim of the research. Preschool education is associated with one of the most sensitive periods for children – preschool age, therefore, it involves a system of methods, forms and means of implementing modern educational content, taking into account the characteristics and nature of pedagogical interaction.

Description of the research progress. The presented educational software products “Grandfather and Turnip”, “Kolobok” and fairy tales of the Cunning Peter are an attempt to answer the need to find forms of work for the development of connected speech in children.

The results of the study. “Grandfather and Turnip”, “Kolobok” and fairy tales about the Cunning Peter provide learning objectives in all educational areas: Coherent speech, Vocabulary, Grammatically correct speech, Sound culture, Perception of a literary work, Reproduction of a literary work. It is impossible to present the possibilities for each of them in this text. Attention will be focused on the main aspects of Connected speech and the perception of a literary work, without claiming to be complete.

Conclusion. The educational software products “Grandfather and Turnip”, “Kolobok”, “Cunning Peter”, presented in this article, contribute to the implementation of modern requirements in the direction of the way of conducting the main form of pedagogical interaction - situation, namely, to take place in a playful form, i.e. play should not be an element, but should be fully integrated into the educational process. They are also suitable for additional forms of interaction that are organized according with the needs and interests of children during extracurricular time. In both cases, they contribute to the formation of competencies. The capabilities of software products are not limited to the presented technological solutions. Their use is a matter of creative search and digital competence of children’s teachers.

Background. Storytelling skills are essential for people in general and for analyzing the formation of child speech in particular. Oration, coherent speech, monologue, narrative, storytelling are all special names for the ability to generate oral texts, which precedes the written skills both in phylogenesis and in ontogenesis. Without analyzing the dynamics of storytelling, it is difficult to analyze the course of linguistic development in children, specifically in bilinguals.

The purpose of the study is to show on specific examples of mini-longitudinal research how the ability to create a narrative in Russian develops among bilingual preschoolers aged 5–7 years, whether this process has features that distinguish it from a similar process in monolingual children; to summarize the experience of narration training methods used abroad and to offer important didactic techniques for teaching how to create a coherent story.

Design. The features of monologue speech, methods of eliciting and evaluating narratives, their significance in pedagogy, linguistics, and psychology are highlighted. In the experimental part, Russian language stories of two bilingual Russian-Finnish bilinguals collected between the ages of five and seven years with an average time interval of six months are compared. Methods of teaching storytelling offered by foreign teachers are analyzed.

Results. It is demonstrated that the reference material is created for specific research purposes and can reflect more or less accurately the search for a solution to a certain linguistic, psychological, cultural, etc. problem. Adults do not expect logic from a small child but try to extract from what they hear the scheme of ideas that she/he has formed about the relationship of events in reality (if she / he says so, then she/he thinks so). The criteria for evaluating narratives are considered. As a result, it is reported that it is difficult to evaluate stories as an indicator of the verbal ability development. The techniques of storytelling supporting the development of coherent speech, and the dynamics of narrative ability are discussed. The article systematizes teaching methods of storytelling and suggests ways to support the development of the verbal ability.

Conclusion. At the end, it is concluded that in order to be able to tell stories, children need to be at a sufficient level of cognitive development, find relationships between the elements of a fragment of reality, know how the environment is arranged (they must have, to some extent, an established picture of the world), be equipped with sufficient phonetic, lexical and grammatical means, possess a suitable narrative genre and its components, select the right type of narration for the listener.

Relevance. Research on the narratives of bilingual children is extremely important, as it shows the child’s full linguistic competence, which in turn will allow teachers and educators to choose the appropriate program.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the narratives of Russian-Swedish billing children. The author examines both mistakes (or “innovations”) and strategies that are used by children with a lack of lexical and / or grammatical means. An attempt will also be made to explain the cause of the observed phenomena.

Description of the research progress. The study involved 25 Russian-Swedish bilingual’s children aged from 4.5 years to 9.2 years. The material for this study was collected using a specially developed tool for collecting narratives Litmus MAIN (The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives). In addition to storytelling from pictures, spontaneous speech data and ethnolinguistic observations were collected.

Results. The study showed that many children were unfamiliar with the Russian equivalent of Swedish words and often used gestures when they did not know the word. Swedish was often used for metalinguistic comments and questions. Children were prone to lexical innovation and changing the meaning of words. They often mixed synonyms or lexical units close in meaning or sound. Children with weak Russian language had cases of transfer, as well as the following grammatical errors: incorrect case endings, mistakes in choosing the verb gender, the use of an incorrect preposition and case form, errors in using an accusative instead of a locative and errors in the form of a verb.

Conclusion. Considering the features of children’s narratives, the author shows how the lack of input and dominant language affects their stories. Since language acquisition in Sweden takes place in a specific context, the input is often limited to situations that the child encounters in daily life. In this regard, parents and teachers of their native language need to find more opportunities to practice the Russian language. It is necessary to create language situations in which children will want to talk about what happened to them. It is important for parents and teachers to try to motivate the child to tell it in Russian, to find time to play together, listen to the child, engage in joint activities and help find lexical means to express their thoughts.

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. 

Building a connected etiquette speech in verbal communication is a long process. This is the fruit of personal development as a result of proper linguistic, ideological, moral and aesthetic education and upbringing. The development by each teacher of his own program for systematic etiquette education will give great results, especially if parents participate in it.

Connected etiquette speech (CES) in preschool children occurs in terms of verbal communication with direct contact or orally, in the form of dialogue. Functionally, the CES is implemented in the form of a connected dialogical unity, consisting of replica-stimuli and replica-responses. In contrast to the usual dialogue, in which speech is produced, ready-made, “cliched” expressions or words-formulas of speech etiquette are reproduced in a connected etiquette speech.

The main goal of connected etiquette speech in preschool children is to bring harmony into their relationships, to provide the necessary mutual tolerance in communication. Verbal communication in kindergarten is carried out in a certain obligatory context, in which the etiquette associated with speech can and should be consciously studied by children in its functional dimensions in the act of verbal communication. Various thematic etiquette situations from the daily life of children are offered.

The study was conducted in a kindergarten in a small town in Bulgaria with preschool children. The children were offered play situations in which they had to use various types of etiquette forms.

The results of the study will be presented at a later stage of work on the problem, when creating a comprehensive Program of mastering unmarked connected speech by these children. The program will include both the provision of knowledge about individual subsystems of speech etiquette as sign systems and rules for their use, and exercises for their practical mastering using appropriate methods and means of constructing connected etiquette speech. Compliance with the rules of etiquette, in principle, presupposes their knowledge, but it would be naive to believe that, knowing the etiquette norms, the child will begin to act in accordance with them. Usually, he remembers them only when he violates them and thereby harms the interests of others. It can be assumed that one of the reasons for this phenomenon is related to the fact that we teach the rules, and not educate according to them.

In the course of the study, a number of conclusions and generalizations are made. Knowledge of speech etiquette ensures its functioning, or etiquette can be formed only through etiquette. This is the only way to build the belief that the use of speech etiquette has become axiomatic, as an obligatory component of interpersonal speech contacts. Etiquette verbal communication should become conscious, and this is possible only when conscious politeness becomes a habit, a norm of behavior.

The relevance of the topic of the article. An analysis of the indicators of irregularity in a child’s speech, speech disorders, and the existing methods of their measurement shows that disturbances in the fluency of speech in preschool children are mainly associated with evolutionary stuttering. There are no methods of objective assessment of fluency of speech and its disorders in stuttering in the Russian literature and speech therapy practice, while abroad there are different models of categorization of indicators of speech irregularity and various objective methods of measuring fluency of speech in children with normal conditions and with stuttering are used.

The aim of the research. The study of physiological and pathological indicators of speech irregularity of preschool children with stuttering and without speech disorders for the differential diagnosis of normal and deviating speech development is the aim of the study.

Description of the research progress. The study involved 35 children aged 4,5–6,5 years: 16 children without speech disorders and 19 children with stuttering of varying severity. The fluency / irregularity of speech was assessed using technology for assessing the indicators of speech irregularity (Vanderbilt technology) based on the analysis of two representative speech samples of 100 words each (a conversation and a story based on a series of plot pictures): the total percentage of speech irregularity, the percentage of physiological and pathological indicators of speech irregularity were calculated, the dominant types of speech irregularity in both groups were identified.

The results of the study. A significant difference was revealed in physiological and pathological indicators of speech irregularity in preschoolers with normal conditions and with stuttering. The article provides evidence of the connection of mainly pathological indicators of speech irregularity with stuttering, and physiological indicators - with normal speech development. In preschoolers with stuttering, a direct relationship was found between the overall percentage of speech irregularity and the severity of stuttering. In the group of children without speech disorders, preschoolers with a risk factor for stuttering were identified, for whose parent’s recommendations on a protective general and speech regime were developed.

Conclusion. The results of the experimental study demonstrate the advisability of including Vanderbilt’s technology in a comprehensive examination of the speech of a preschool child. The specific nature and frequency of manifestation of indicators of speech irregularity in preschool children make important diagnostic information about the typical / atypical development of speech irregularity.

Relevance (context) of the topic of the article. Speech development is a key factor in the academic success of students. Reading and writing as types of speech activity are metalinguistic competencies that provide students of all levels of education with the assimilation of the content of academic disciplines, communication and influencing further socialization. Therefore, the issues of timely mass diagnostics of speech development disorders in modern children are becoming more relevant. The article examines the domestic and world experience in the diagnosis of speech disorders, including the use of screenings for assessing the risks of speech and psychological development; the changes in the system of dispensary speech therapy observation of children that have occurred in Russia over the past 10 years are analyzed, models of psychological and pedagogical support of children with speech disorders are described.

The aim of the article is to describe a model of a standardized two-stage speech screening procedure; to present the content of the first stage, the algorithm for its implementation and the analysis of the results of the primary approbation of the questionnaire for assessing speech development in 7-year-old children.

Description of the research progress. The study was conducted in 15 educational organizations in Moscow in 2020-2021. Based on modern ideas about the child’s speech development, a questionnaire was developed to assess speech development and tested in preschool groups with 686 children aged 7 years-7 years and 3 months. The main research methods are observation, questionnaire, methods of mathematical statistics.

The results of the study. A questionnaire for assessing the speech development of a 7-year-old child is presented, which allows identifying students who need logoscreening (stage 2) and differentiated help from a speech therapist teacher. Statistical data on speech disorders in this age group were obtained.

Conclusion. It is concluded that it is important to conduct two-stage speech screening in critical periods of development, and an algorithm for its testing is proposed. The advantages of the screening system for the selection of children in need of psychological and pedagogical support for the executive authorities in the field of education, educational organizations and the child are indicated.