Children in kindergarten can develop speech in different ways. During my training in kindergarten, I noticed that educators rarely do it when talking to children who are describing an image. Therefore, I decided to explore this aspect in my thesis.
In the theoretical part, I presented speech development in preschool period and its promotion in kindergarten, how educators conduct their conversation with the children and the ways of developing the themes, which include a description (picture). I carried out the survey in accordance with the quantitative research paradigm and then I presented the results in the empirical part of the thesis. Descriptive and causal non-experimental methods of pedagogical research were used.
I analysed audio recordings of 10 conversations of educators with children from three different age groups who were describing a picture. For this purpose I also used an observation sheet. After this I also interviewed the educators on how they conduct their conversation when children are describing images. I found that in the beginning of the conversation most teachers allowed the children to choose their seats; they were sitting in a semicircle. The educators used the picture to motivate the children and they also announced what they would discuss and how they would do it. All the educators with the exception of one held the image in their hands during the conversation. Only in one group the conversation had to be stopped due to the restlessness of the children, whereas it was not difficult to maintain communication in other groups. In the conversation, the children answered the educators' questions which were mainly of lower level questions. We noticed that in addition to describing (pictures) the ways of developing themes in a conversation also included storytelling and outlining or labelling. Most educators (except three) followed the order from general to individual questions in their conversations. They were trying to use literary language; however, they also used non-literary elements. No significant differences were noticed in the discussions among educators and children to which the age of the children could affect. Of course, older children use rich vocabulary and they are more experienced, therefore the questions asked by the educators in the older groups of children were more complex questions involving comparison and reasoning. Based on my observations and on the responses of the educators in the interview, I can say that they are generally aware of the characteristics of their conversations with children.
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