SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online

 
vol.30 número2El rol del psicólogo en el equipo Interdisciplinariasciplinario de cirugía bariátricaSchool violence: Subjective theories of academic advisory board members from six chilean schools índice de autoresíndice de materiabúsqueda de artículos
Home Pagelista alfabética de revistas  

Servicios Personalizados

Revista

Articulo

Indicadores

  • No hay articulos citadosCitado por SciELO

Links relacionados

  • No hay articulos similaresSimilares en SciELO

Compartir


Interdisciplinaria

versión On-line ISSN 1668-7027

Resumen

MENTI, Alejandra Beatriz  y  ROSEMBERG, Celia Renata. Properties lexical of the linguistic environment generated in Social Science classes in primary school: A study of the vocabulary to which children are exposed. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2013, vol.30, n.2, pp.201-218. ISSN 1668-7027.

This study is based on the concern for the differences observed between students in relation to the breadth and diversity of vocabulary that they have. These differences undoubtedly affect the comprehension and production of texts and also the opportunity of learning from them. From the psycholinguistics, sociopragmatic (Tomasello, 2003, 2008) and experiential perspective (Nelson, 2007), which is the frame of this research, it is assumed that vocabulary acquisition occurs in those conversational exchanges in which social support and situational context, nonverbal and linguistic, allows the child to infer the meaning of unknown words. Research focused on pre-school children showed that the type of language used by adults, in particular the use of unknown, abstract and semantically complex vocabulary, affects the development of children's vocabulary (Beals, 1997; Beals & Tabors, 1995; Weizman & Snow, 2001). Moreover, recent studies focused on the school environment have emphasized the important role that vocabulary acquires not only in the first steps of literacy, but also throughout the whole process that leads to the command of comprehension and production of written and verbal texts (Joshi, 2005; Perfetti, 2007; Protopapas, Sideridis, Mouzaki & Simos, 2007; Sénéchal, Ouellette & Rodney, 2006). However, these researches have not explored the opportunities that children have to learn vocabulary during Science classes in elementary school. In this sense, this study aimed at analyzing the lexical properties of the linguistic environment -quantity, diversity, the degree of familiarity and the abstraction of vocabulary- which is generated in teaching situations of Social Science in elementary school. The corpus under analysis is made up of 11,318 interactional turns -children: 6,306; teachers: 5,012- produced in 12 spontaneous teaching situations which took place in Social Science classes. The situations were registered in 12 courses -4 courses of 1st grade, 4 courses of 3rd grade and 4 courses of 5th grade from elementary schools; 2 of them from rural areas and 2 from urban areas located in the Province of Córdoba (Argentina). Through a quantitative procedure, the amount, diversity and the abstraction of vocabulary that shaped the discourse of teachers during the teaching situations in 1st, 3rd and 5th grade from schools in urban and rural areas were analyzed comparatively. Besides, a scale was elaborated to measure the degree of familiarity of words used by teachers during classes. The results of this study showed that the major differences in the lexical properties of the linguistic environment to which children are exposed to all throughout the elementary school, were not found between 1st and 3rd grade, but between these two grades and 5th grade. These results did not show that the contexts of 3rd grade entail more opportunities to learn vocabulary than the environments of 1st grade. This could be attributed to the fact that exchanges in Social Science classes in 3rd grade did not show a progressive decontextualization of knowledge regarding 1st grade. Instead, the exchanges focused on concepts closely related to the children's environment and familiar vocabulary. Moreover no differences between rural and urban schools were observed. The results of this study have important pedagogical implications insofar as they highlight the need to increase opportunities for learning the vocabulary further than preschool age, since the breadth of the child's vocabulary is a predictor of the acquisition of the writing system (Goswami, 2003; Perfetti, 1992, 2007), as well as the comprehension and production of texts (Joshi, 2005; Perfetti, 2007; Protopapas, Sideridis, Mouzaki, & Simos, 2007; Sénéchal, Ouellette, & Rodney, 2006). In this sense, the primary school should be a favorable environment in which all students have during his career in the school increasingly more opportunities to listen to and, therefore, learn different, abstract and unfamiliar words.

Palabras clave : Social Science classes; Vocabulary; Diversity; Abstraction; Familiarity.

        · resumen en Español     · texto en Español     · Español ( pdf )

 

Creative Commons License Todo el contenido de esta revista, excepto dónde está identificado, está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons