Open Accessphilosophising with young children as a language-promoting principle
Author(s) -
Katrin Alt
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
childhood and philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.14
H-Index - 2
eISSN - 2525-5061
pISSN - 1984-5987
DOI - 10.12957/childphilo.2019.42556
Subject(s) - dialogic , context (archaeology) , class (philosophy) , verb , test (biology) , psychology , period (music) , interdependence , pedagogy , mathematics education , linguistics , developmental psychology , sociology , epistemology , philosophy , history , social science , paleontology , archaeology , biology , aesthetics
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.