DEVELOPMENT OF COHERENT SPEECH OF SENIOR PRESCHOOL CHILDREN ON THE BASIS OF AWARENESS OF LANGUAGE AND SPEECH UNITS

Abstract

The article presents a theoretical and experimental study of the problem of development of coherent speech of senior preschool children on the basis of awareness of the units of the language system. The importance of children's mastering of essential characteristics of different functional and semantic types of utterances (narration, description, reasoning) is emphasised, which will further contribute to the formation of successful language and speech competence of children. It is proved that with the awareness of language and speech, senior preschool children master conscious speech behaviour, and well-developed and conscious speech becomes the basis for verbal operation with meaningful units of language and speech. The paper presents scientific approaches to understanding coherent speech as the ability to use the whole arsenal of linguistic means in constructing coherent statements: narration, description, reasoning, and analyses the positions of scientists from different sciences on the need for children to understand coherent speech. The study included the study of coherent utterances of senior preschool children by the following indicators: composing a story, description, reasoning with a certain structure; content characteristics of the utterance; variety of vocabulary and different types of communication; volume of the utterance, presence of sentences of different complexity and their quantitative verbal content, specific linguistic means of expression for different types of stories; ability to objectify language and reflect on speech. The article presents an analysis of the results of the study, which indicate the insufficient ability of senior preschool children to compose stories of various types, which depends, firstly, on the immaturity of the speaker's speech and communication abilities and, secondly, on the lack of knowledge of the essential features of the story, description, reasoning, inability to objectify them and reflect on speech. It is proved that teaching storytelling should be based on children's conscious (explicit) knowledge of language and speech with a methodologically correct psychological and linguistic developmental approach and taking into account the peculiarities of children.