Language development and quality of classroom interactions in kindergarten among five-to-six-year-old children / Desarrollo del lenguaje y calidad de las interacciones en el aula en niños de cinco a seis años de edad en la etapa preescolar

Abstract

The influence of the educational environment on cognitive and language development has been studied for a long time but still remains relevant and important for preschool education. In the present study, the instructional support domain of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) method was used for the educational environment assessment. All the aspects of language development were measured, including phonemic awareness, expressive vocabulary, grammar awareness and narratives’ production. Two hundred and sixty preschoolers (49% boys) between the ages of five and six participated in the study. The results revealed that children from kindergarten groups with a higher level of instructional support demonstrated better lexical and grammatical performance and better ability to compose narratives than children from groups with a lower level of instructional support. Furthermore, children from the groups with high instructional support quality used complex phrases more often, as well as a larger number of logical connectors, than children from the groups with low instructional support quality. In contrast, no significant differences in phonemic and vocabulary aspects of language development were noted. Differences in grammar were contradictory and require clarification in future research.