Children's Levels of Comprehending Connectives

Connectives which organize inter-sentence relations are signs of proficiency in textual level. For this reason, the knowledge of connectives indicates a high cognitive level regarding language acquisition. Determination of children's knowledge of connectives might provide information about their levels in the language acquisition process. This descriptive study adopted survey method. The purpose of the study is to determine children's levels of comprehending connectives in Turkish language. Based on this main problem, research questions are which types of connectives children can understand better in terms of structure and meaning, and whether children's levels of understanding connectives differ according to gender, educational background of parents and socioeconomic status of children. The participants of the study are 90 preschool students from two different schools at different socioeconomic status in Antalya. All of the participants are 5 years old. Data were collected via Test of Comprehending Connectives, developed by researchers. Percentages and frequencies were calculated, and independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA were carried out for data analysis of data. According to the results, participants were most successful at discourse adverbials and least successful at coordinating connectives in terms of syntax. With regard to semantic, participants were most successful at temporal, and least successful at comparative connectives. In addition, the data analyses revealed no significant difference in terms of children's genders, socio-economic status and parents’ educational background. However, it was found that participants who do not have siblings were more successful than the ones who have siblings. Based on the findings, content centered instruction is recommended while teaching connectives regardless of students’ demographic characteristics.