The development of dialogic communication among preschoolers with general speech underdevelopment in the context of a communicative-activity approach

Abstract

The relevance of the problem under study is determined by the tasks of developing a child as a subject of activity and relations with him/herself, other children, adults and the social world; the inclusion of students with disabilities in the general educational environment and the need to create special conditions to meet their special educational needs, including the formation of the necessary life competences, which include communication skills. The experimental research involved 75 senior preschoolers attending compensatory groups for children with severe speech impairments in preschool educational institutions in the city of Belgorod and the Belgorod Region. Sixteen speech therapy classes were analyzed in terms of their communicative orientation. Theoretical and empirical research methods were used, including: observation, conversation, analysis of the products of children's speech activity, pedagogical experiment, methods of mathematical statistics. During the pedagogical experiment, the features of dialogic communication of preschoolers with general speech underdevelopment were determined, the data available in the scientific literature on the difficulties in forming their communicative and speech skills were confirmed. The necessity of the purposeful development of dialogic communication in children with general speech underdevelopment in conducting specially organized remedial learning communicative classes was proved. Changes in the level of development of dialogic communication between senior preschoolers with general speech underdevelopment (GSU) were revealed according to the following criteria: sociability, ability to adequately respond to the interlocutor's speech, ability to initiate dialogue, dialogue culture, which are statistically significant compared with the results of primary diagnostics. Statistically significant differences were found between the data of the ascertaining and control stages of the experiment for each criterion of dialogic communication between children with GSU: upon criterion “sociability” (χ2observed =12.41 > χ2critical = 11.34, with р = 0.01); upon criterion “the ability to adequately respond to the interlocutor's speech” (χ2observed =11.39 > χ2critical = 11.34, with р = 0.01); upon criterion “the ability to initiate dialogue” (χ2observed =12,47 > χ2critical = 11,34, with р = 0,01); upon criterion “dialogue culture” (χ2observed =16.25 > χ2critical = 11.34, with р = 0.01). This confirms the authors' assumption that the communicative orientation of speech therapy classes affects the development of dialogic communication among senior preschoolers with general speech underdevelopment.