Speech development is central to early childhood education. It is coherent speech that realizes the communicative function of the language and determines the level of mental development of the child. There are a number of features in the development of speech in young children.
Features of the development of speech in preschool childhood
The development of the child's speech occurs simultaneously with the development of thinking and is associated with the complication of activities and communication with people around. Voice responses in children of the first year of life represent a preparatory stage in the development of speech. From three months, the child begins to repeat the sounds he heard: hums ("khy", "gy", "ahy"), hums (sings vowel sounds ("ah-ah", "uh-eh").
From the second half of the year, babbling appears ("ba-ba-ba", "ma-ma-ma", "cha-cha-cha"). Babbling is already controlled by the baby's hearing. An adult needs to get the child to be able to repeat the proposed sounds. From this age, imitation will become the most important means of mastering speech.
By the end of the first year, syllables appear in the child's speech, pronounced together - words. By the age of one, the baby should be able to speak about 10 words (including simple ones: "av-av", "du-du", etc.). Initially, a separate word has the meaning of a sentence for a child. This period lasts up to about one and a half years. Then children begin to use two-word phrases, and later, three-word ones.
The speech of a young child is fragmentary, contains, in addition to words, gestures, facial expressions, onomatopoeia. Gradually, speech becomes more coherent. More frequent and different communication of a child with adults and peers creates favorable conditions for the development of speech (vocabulary expands).
Children of three years old are just beginning to master the ability to coherently express their thoughts, dialogical speech becomes available to them (answers to questions). Toddlers still make many mistakes when building a sentence.
In the middle preschool age, the activation of the vocabulary has a huge developmental effect. The child begins to use adjectives and adverbs in speech. The first conclusions and generalizations appear. The child often uses subordinate clauses, subordinate clauses appear (“I hid the car that my dad bought”).
At this age, children prefer to answer questions shortly. Often, instead of formulating the answer on their own, they use the formulation of the question in the affirmative. The structure of speech is not yet completely perfect (often sentences begin with conjunctions: "because", "when"). Children can compose small stories from a picture, but more often they copy an adult's model.
In older preschool children, speech development reaches a fairly high level. Children can formulate a question, correct and supplement the answers of their comrades. The ability to distinguish the main from the secondary appears. The child already makes up descriptive and plot stories quite consistently. The ability to convey in a story your emotional attitude to the described phenomena or objects is not yet sufficiently developed.
Tasks of teaching coherent speech
Young children are taught to express requests in words, to answer questions from adults ("Who is this?", "What is he?", "What is he doing?"). They are also encouraged to more often turn to adults and peers on various occasions.
At a younger preschool age, the child should be fostered with the need to share impressions, talk about what he did. It is also necessary to cultivate the habit of using simple forms of etiquette (say hello, say goodbye, thank, apologize).
In the middle preschool age, children are taught to answer and ask questions. They support the desire to tell about what they observed and experienced. At this stage of development, the development of the rules of etiquette continues (you need to teach the child to answer the phone, meet guests, not interfere with the conversation of adults).
In older preschool age, they teach more accurately and fully to answer questions, listen and at the same time not interrupt the interlocutor, not be distracted. Children should be encouraged to communicate about things that are not currently in sight (about books read, film watched). Older children should be proficient in various forms of speech etiquette and use them without being reminded.
