CC BY
15Oksana Ushakova
Professor, Chief Researcher, Institute for the Study of Childhood, Family and Upbringing of the Russian Academy of Education, Moscow, Russia; e-mail: [email protected]
Valentina Yashina
Professor, Department of Theory and Methodology, Preschool Education Moscow Pedagogical State University, Moscow, Russia [email protected], Russia; e-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: The study of the native language in preschool childhood is aimed at achieving the following goals: the social and intellectual development of preschool children; mastery of language as a means of communication in everyday life; the development of communicative abilities; enrichment of vocabulary and the formation of the grammatical structure of speech; elementary mastery of basic visual and expressive means and sound culture education; development of the the ability to understand language and speech phenomena, to assess them in terms of compliance with the situation and sphere of communication; acquisition of competence in the field of native language and speech communication. At preschool age, the practical development of the native language reaches a high level. A well-known researcher of children's speech, F. A. Sokhin, believed that there should be special work done on the development of speech, and that improvement of verbal communication and vocabulary of the child was required. He noted that the development of conceptual thinking was impossible without the assimilation of new words, new knowledge, and ideas. Furthermore, if new impressions were not fixed in words, the child would not consciously use them in their statements. F. A. Sokhin also emphasized that a basic understanding of the phenomena of speech and language may develop if work was done on the logic and meaning of words and language (and not only on the logic of subject relations). He proved (and the study of E. M. Strunina confirmed this) that the formation of new knowledge and ideas was impossible without the introduction of new words (such as those that denote objects, phenomena, their properties and qualities) to the speech and mental activity of children. An effective method of disclosing the meaning of words is the use of synonymic and antonymic comparisons. In speech, the child viewed the words as related units of language. Purely linguistic work is focused on the formation of representations about the semantic relationship of words within an area of vocabulary. The main purpose of speech education is to enable the child to creatively master the norms and rules of the native language, to apply them flexibly in specific situations, and master basic communication skills.
Development of a child's speech is based on the following: understanding the meaning of the word and the enrichment of the child's dictionary, the assimilation of the system of linguistic concepts within morphology, syntax, and word formation, mastering the sound culture of speech, and the formation of coherent monological speech. The expansion of the semantic field and the use of the associative principle of assimilation of vocabulary, as well as the formation of linguistic generalizations in the acquisition of grammatical structure helps to develop preschoolers' awareness of speech. That is, the ability to select accurate and expressive means of constructing coherent.
Meaning is central to the ontogenesis of speech and thinking. Understanding the origin of meaning is one of the conditions for identifying the internal laws of the formation and development of human language ability. Linguists distinguish between grammatical meaning (belonging of a word to a certain class, peculiarities of its combination, etc.) and lexical meaning, which is determined by the correlation of the word to its corresponding concept (core of its lexical meaning), and its place in the lexical system of the language (i.e. connections of the word to other words).The main condition for the realization of speech-understanding its meaning. Various associations with meanings can create parallel ways of
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expressing thoughts. The Association method is one of the most common ways to evaluate semantic fields. To determine the lexical meaning of the word it is necessary to do the following: find out its subject-matter and conceptual-logical content; establish how the reality described by the word is connected with things that objectively exist in the surrounding reality; to reveal how the defined lexical meaning correlates with another, since the word expresses its meanings not in isolation from the lexical-semantic system of a particular language, but in an indissoluble connection with it, as its constituent element; find a distinctive feature that would allow isolation of this value from a number of similar ones.
For the correct understanding of the meaning of words, so as to employ their exact use in coherent speech, an elementary understanding of its composition, shades of meaning, and possible combinations , is necessary. A huge role is played here by the child's developed "sense of language". It can be formed as an attentive attitude to the constituent elements of the word, which sometimes act as the exponents of the finest shades of meaning that distinguish one word from another. Misunderstanding of semantic shades of the word leads to inaccuracy of their use. Violation of the laws of compatibility of words leads to grammatical and stylistic inaccuracies in speech and errors in word usage.
Keywords: language, preschool child
DOI:
PROPORTIONALITY OF MAGNITUDES' TRANSFORMATIONS: SCAFFOLDING SUBSTANTIAL LEARNING
COOPERATION IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT
Mariya Yanishevskaya
Leading researcher, Psychological Institute of Russian Academy of Education, Moscow, Russia; e-mail:
Elena Vysotskaya
Leading researcher, Psychological Institute of Russian Academy of Education, Moscow, Russia; e-mail:
Anastasia Lobanova
Researcher, Psychological Institute of Russian Academy of Education, Moscow, Russia; e-mail: nastya-
Abstract: Proportionality is a topic for research on the formation of concepts and misconceptions. It is both an interesting and challenging domain, especially for studies concerning the transition period between primary and secondary education. The complexity of the concept stems from the contradictions of changing values within the proportion, and changes to the proportion itself, which cannot be performed directly. Our aim is to reconstruct the origin of the proportionality concept as we design an appropriate computerized scaffold for the initial step of the concept's acquisition. The "Make it float!" simulation introduces students to a special digital space: the "shipyard" with water of different salinity, which allows testing of ships that students combine from sinking and floating units. The simulation challenges students to accommodate their actions to control the state of the object under construction. Coordination of the magnitudes' transformations, which focuses on the preservation of buoyancy, leads to comprehension of proportionality between heterogeneous magnitudes of interest (such as mass and volume). Both partners that share the control over the ship's construction must suggest the exact way to coordinate their efforts, as there is no way for them to achieve the desired result individually. Our pilot teaching experiments were carried out with groups of students (8-12 years old). They proved this approach to be effective for the acquisition of the proportionality concept through the meaningful coordination of joint actions. Analysis of students' progress within the designed computer-supported
