Philosophising with young children as a language-promoting principle

Abstract

Children develop language and communication skills through interaction with adults and other children. This study therefore focuses on two interdependent issues: the effect of philosophizing with children on children's language development and the speech acts of teachers and children in philosophical enquiries. As part of a before-after test with the “Hamburger Verfahren zur Analyse des Sprachstandes Fünfjähriger” (Reich & Roth, 2004, Hamburg Procedure for Analysing the Language Level of Five Year-olds), weekly philosophical discussions were undertaken with a test class over a period of six months. The central findings are that the philosophising children developed significantly higher language ability compared with a non-philosophising control class in two areas, namely general performance in discussion and the use of more sophisticated connectors. A further part of the study compared the speech acts of the children and their pre-school teacher in the context of philosophical discussion with their speech acts in a different dialogic situation (dialogic discussion of picture books). This showed that philosophical questions from the pre-school teacher led to the production of particularly complex language by the children. Complex speech acts involve the use of higher-level verb structures and connectors. These are necessary in order to reason and act as a citizen agent and are supported by philosophising with children, as this study shows.