Language intervention to facilitate the acquisition of English as a second langauge by pre-school children.

[摘要] This dissertation explores the role of the speech-languagetherapist in second language acquisition. The motivation for thestudy arose out of recent political changes in South Africa,which led to desegregated education, and the need for youngchildren to cope with English as the medium of instruction fromthe start of their schooling. The aim was to determine whetherlanguage intervention provided by a speech-language therapistsignificantly improved the English proficiency of a group ofblack pre-school children. A pre-test, post-test, centrol groupexperimental design was employed. The comprehension andexpression of English vocabulary and syntax of thirty, three tosix year old subjects was assessed using a modified version ofthe Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language-Revised (Carrow,3.988), a newly devised vocabulary measure, as well as crystal's(1982) Profile in Lexical Semantics, and the Language AssessmentRemediation and Screening Procedure (crystal et aL, 1989).The results showed that the English proficiency of the group ofchildren who received language intervention from a speech-languagetherapist, improved significantly more than that of thefirst control group, who received only additional input inEnglish, and the second control group, who received no inputbeyond that provided through the regular pre-school programme.The positive results of this research can now be applied to theteaching of languages other than English, and the training ofteachers who would like to improve their skills at facilitatinglanguage acquisition.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand