المفردات اللغوية الشائعة لدى الأطفال البحرانيين عند بداية التحاقهم بالمدرسة الإبتدائية

Abstract

Abstract : The purpose of this study was to assess the vocabulary list of school-age children, just before they enter their first year of elementary education, in the rural areas of Bahrain. It was argued that such a list would be very helpful to planners and textbook writers for elementary education curricula. To achieve this purpose, a field study was carried out on 100 Bahrainian children distributed in various rural areas. A sample of children's talk was recorded for each child in a semi-standardized situation, in which the child's talk was elicited in an individual testing setting by means of a pictorial test and questionnaires that both run about basic life situations, which were hypothesized to constitute actual cores of children's language Tape recordings for each child were taken for about an hour and a half. These recordings were then transferred to copybooks and analyzed as the different words constituting each child's recording. These words were then classified into nouns, verbs, and articles. The results of this analysis were handed over to the computer to determine the frequency of each word and the number of words specified by each variable: sex, kindergarten attendance, father's profession, and date of birth in the family The results of the data analysis indicated that it was possible to obtain a total of 104,889 current words. This consisted of 4,354 different words, out of which were nouns (3,467), verbs (860), and articles (27). It was also possible to count the number of colloquial and standard Arabic words. The number of standard Arabic words was 2,934 and the number of colloquial words was 1,420; the percentage of standard Arabic words was 67.3, and that of colloquial words was 32.6. The results of the analysis showed that children who attended kindergarten used more words than those who did not attend kindergarten. The average number of words recorded for kindergarten children was 1,098.1; that for non-kindergarten children was 883.9. Children from the upper class recorded more words than those from lower classes A final list of the children's vocabulary was made in which the different words were arranged in an alphabetical order and coded classification of the word with respect to its frequency to origin in standard Arabic.