Assessing the Development of Children’s Speech and Language Comprehension in the First Grade of Primary School

Abstract

The first grade represents a turning point in every child’s life. The child is set goals and tasks for the achievement of which a proper physical, psychological and social development is needed. For a child to successfully communicate with the environment and peers and respond to the demands of school and society, a basic prerequisite is understanding and communication. Speech as a primary tool of communication is an important segment in the future life and work of the child. Speech learning and comprehension are mostly learned through listening, imitation and interaction. If any of these components are absent, communication with the environment will not be appropriate for the child’s age or the needs of the school system, and the child will lag behind peers. We must not forget the time we live in is the time of digitalization and smartphones. We are aware that children under the age of six have a poorly developed knowledge of their native language and that there are increasing occurrences of speech and language disorders, slow speech and language development, or underdeveloped speech by four-year-olds and five-year-olds. For these reasons, we wanted to examine the understanding of speech and language in groups of children in the first grade of primary school.

The aim of the research was to evaluate the understanding of speech and language of children in the first grade of primary school by examining concrete nouns, verbs in the present tense, descriptive adjectives, possessive pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, past tense (third person singular), future time (first person plural), abstract nouns, and complex commands.

The results of the study showed that children in first grade have a poorly developed understanding of speech and language and that girls’ speech and communication development is higher than that of boys.