Children's language : assessing Romanian children with TRAS- Early Registration of Language Development
Gabriela I. Negoescu · NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives · 2006
This study regards the language development of children from kindergartens in Bucharest, Romania. The first part of the study is theoretical and concerns a description of the Romanian context as well as relevant selections from literature written about language. Three of the approaches in language development are presented and discussed. Special attention is given to the theory of Bloom and Lahey (1978). Discussions of the steps in language development that children make from birth to 5 years of age are selected from different authors and presented in this study. The study continues with the description of TRAS (Early Registration of Language Development) which is the main instrument in focus of this thesis. In order to be applied with Romanian children, TRAS was translated and adapted into Romanian language. The practical part of the study was carried out with 33 children from 3 to 5 years of age chosen from 3 kindergartens from Bucharest. Three of them are children with special educational needs and two from them benefit of speech therapy program. During 4 months all 33 children were observed and interacted with the researcher in the kindergarten classroom and kindergarten playground. Their language abilities were registered in TRAS schemes. In order to register language abilities each child was observed and tape recorded for 2-3 days. The data collected through TRAS schemes was introduced in the SPSS statistical program and analyzed. This study also includes a qualitative component through a more ample description of the three children with special educational needs and description of sentences of children s language. The analysis and discussion of the findings are presented in line with the four research questions. The first question regards if TRAS can be applied with the Romanian population. Therefore the analysis and discussion focus on variance and relevance of the answers for the items of TRAS from 3-4 and 4-5 years of age. The next two research questions focus on language abilities of children. The results are discussed in line with 12 computed means for the aspects and areas of TRAS: interaction, communication, attention, language perception, linguistic awareness, pronunciation, and active vocabulary, sentence building as well as blue, red and green areas. The fourth question regards comparison between the Romanian data and Norwegian data collected with TRAS and provided by Bretvet Competence center from Oslo from 109 children from Norway. The study ends with conclusions and some suggestions for future studies or projects that may continue what this study begun. The suggestions refer to extension of the study in other regions of Romania, planning an intervention program and elaborating aid material in order to facilitate TRAS application in kindergartens.