Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北護理健康大學 === 語言治療與聽力研究所 === 104 === The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between the home literacy environment (HLE) and pragmatic skills of four-year-old children in Shalu District, Taichung. A home literacy environment questionnaire and Chinese version of pediatric evaluation of disability inventory (PEDI-C) were hand delivered in kindergartens to 521 parents. As a result, a total of 339 valid surveys were obtained and analysed via SPSS20.0 (Statistical Package for Social Science) computer programme in order to explore how different dimensions of home literacy environment impact the development of children’s pragmatic skills.
As for the background of respondents’ families, the majority of four-year-olds are the first child of two, living with more than three family members, and start private preschool education from pre-kindergarten programmes. Moreover, it can be seem that the child's primary caregiver are mom aged between 31 to 40 years old, who usually begin to read to their children from one year old. Furthermore, the most children’s mom are native and the socio-economic status of their family are mostly in the upper middle class.
The results of ANOVA indicate that the majority of background variables do not have significant influence on children’s pragmatic skills except the variable related to child's primary caregiver. It shows that the as child's primary caregiver, parents have stronger positive impact on children’s pragmatic skills than grandparents. However, the result of post-hoc test illustrates that the difference between these two groups is not significant, which means child's primary caregiver just affect children’s pragmatic skills a little bit. .
In terms of the impact of parents’ reading attitude on four-year-old children’s pragmatic skills, the data demonstrates that the influence is significant. The frequency of the following parents’ reading attitude is higher, the children’s pragmatic skills are greater, which includes: 1) parents reading job-related materials at home; 2) bringing children to read/ buy books at libraries or bookstores; 3) accompanying children to watch kids learning programmes; 4)discussing with children while listening to audiobooks; 5) playing language games with children.
The home literacy environment factors associated with parent-child reading activities also influence children’s pragmatic skills significantly. To be more precise, if children are more interested in adult books, their pragmatic skills will be better. On the contrary, children who watch the most TV may have poor pragmatic skills. Lastly, the impact of home literacy resource on four-year-old children’s pragmatic skills is not significant.
Taking into account the above findings, it can be realized that reading at home benefits children’s pragmatic skills a lot. To make sure that home literacy environment can create positive impact, not only should parents have positive reading attitude, but they have to provide sufficient reading resources for their children at home. Pragmatic skills are vital for communicating with others and children need to enhance this ability via interactive imitation learning. As a result, the dimensions of parents’ reading attitude and parent-child reading activities are more relatively significant than home literacy resource for children’s pragmatic skills.
|