Teaching dialogic speech to older preschoolers with mental retardation

In accordance with the Federal State Educational Standard of Preschool Education (FGOS DO), the development of speech and communication skills of children with adults and peers is among the important tasks of teaching and upbringing. The formation of dialogical skills of preschoolers is a necessary condition for their social and personal development. This requirement fully applies to children with mental retardation (hereinafter referred to as PSA). The article presents an analysis of dialogical utterances of preschoolers of this category, defines the content of the formation of skills to participate in a dialogue: to respond to replicas and request information. Communicative situations, role-playing dialogues, various kinds of games and exercises are defined as effective learning tools. The purpose of the study is to analyze the pedagogical conditions for the effective formation of dialogical speech in older preschoolers with mental retardation. As the main experimental methods, observation and pedagogical experiment were used, including children’s answers to different types of questions (reproductive, explanatory and alternative) and independent formulation of questions based on visual schemes–hints. On the basis of the experimental study, which involved 40 pupils of the older group with mental retardation at the age of 5–6 years, the characteristic features of the development of dialogue in children with mental retardation were confirmed. It is noted that with the seeming simplicity of the dialogue, greater independence from language norms, the children of the category under consideration experienced significant difficulties in building and maintaining the line of dialogue. The ascertaining experiment, conducted with older preschoolers with mental retardation, showed that an independent dialogue in most of them is significantly difficult and is characterized by a number of features associated with both a lag in speech and a lag in the development of thinking and speech-thinking activity. The content of the formative stage of the experiment included work on the formation of the ability to answer questions of varying complexity and independently request information. The novelty of the study lies in clarifying the content of the work on the development of dialogue skills in accordance with the linguistic features of this form of speech; updating data on the features of dialogic speech and communication skills in children with ASD, determining the stages of formation of dialogic skills in this category of preschoolers. The research materials make it possible to outline new strategic guidelines for corrective action in the field of speech, namely, the communicative development of preschoolers with mental retardation.

dialogic speech, research of dialogic speech in children with ASD, formation of dialogic skills, information request, initiative speech