Mother Tongue Proficiency and Expression Skills in 5-6-Year-Old Children


Aydin B.

HACETTEPE UNIVERSITESI EGITIM FAKULTESI DERGISI-HACETTEPE UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, cilt.29, sa.4, ss.16-27, 2014 (SSCI) identifier identifier

Özet

The aim of this study is to determine the mother tongue proficiency in 5-6-year-old children in pre-school education. The corpus consists of the responses of pre-school students to different questions asked by their teachers (n=25) at a kindergarten in Ankara in the academic year 2011-2012. As some students were not in class and some did not answer the questions at the time of the inquiry, each question was evaluated in accordance with the number of students who responded the questions. Responses to 8 questions were examined within the frame of linguistic and conceptual knowledge. We observed that the students' answers to the questions were usually personal and based on the knowledge acquired from their families, environment, school and the television. It was found that the answers shared some common concepts stemming from the fact that the learners are in the same age group. Some differences were also remarked related to the learners' imaginative power, creativity, and gender.