Propiedades léxicas del entorno lingüístico generadas en clases de Ciencias Sociales en la escuela primaria: un estudio del vocabulario al que se hallan expuestos los niños

Abstract

El trabajo que se informa tuvo por objeto estudiar las propiedades léxicas del entorno lingüístico (cantidad, diversidad, abstracción y grado de familiaridad del vocabulario) que se generan en las situaciones de enseñanza de Ciencias Sociales en la escuela primaria. Por medio de un procedimiento cuantitativo se analizó comparativamente la cantidad, la diversidad y la abstracción del vocabulario que configuraba el discurso de las maestras durante las situaciones de enseñanza en primer, tercer y quinto grado de escuelas primarias urbanas y rurales. Asimismo, se elaboró una escala para medir el grado de familiaridad que las palabras empleadas en las clases tenían para los niños. Los resultados de este estudio mostraron que las diferencias más importantes en las propiedades léxicas del entorno lingüístico a que se hallan expuestos los niños a lo largo de la escuela primaria no se encontraron entre primer y tercer grado, sino entre estos grados y quinto grado. Estos resultados no mostraron que los contextos de tercer grado conlleven más oportunidades de aprendizaje de vocabulario que los entornos de primer grado. Esto podría atribuirse a que en los intercambios en las clases de Ciencias Sociales en tercer grado no se observó una descontextualización progresiva de los conocimientos con respecto a primer grado. Los intercambios se centraron, en cambio, en conceptos muy cercanos al entorno de los niños y en vocabulario familiar. Por su parte, no se observaron diferencias entre las escuelas rurales y las escuelas urbanas.

This study is based on the concern for the differences observed between students in relation to the breadth and diversity of vocabulary that they have. These differences undoubtedly affect the comprehension and production of texts and also the opportunity of learning from them. From the psycholinguistics, sociopragmatic (Tomasello, 2003, 2008) and experiential perspective (Nelson, 2007), which is the frame of this research, it is assumed that vocabulary acquisition occurs in those conversational exchanges in which social support and situational context, nonverbal and linguistic, allows the child to infer the meaning of unknown words. Research focused on pre-school children showed that the type of language used by adults, in particular the use of unknown, abstract and semantically complex vocabulary, affects the development of children's vocabulary (Beals, 1997; Beals & Tabors, 1995; Weizman & Snow, 2001). Moreover, recent studies focused on the school environment have emphasized the important role that vocabulary acquires not only in the first steps of literacy, but also throughout the whole process that leads to the command of comprehension and production of written and verbal texts (Joshi, 2005; Perfetti, 2007; Protopapas, Sideridis, Mouzaki & Simos, 2007; Sénéchal, Ouellette & Rodney, 2006). However, these researches have not explored the opportunities that children have to learn vocabulary during Science classes in elementary school. In this sense, this study aimed at analyzing the lexical properties of the linguistic environment -quantity, diversity, the degree of familiarity and the abstraction of vocabulary- which is generated in teaching situations of Social Science in elementary school. The corpus under analysis is made up of 11,318 interactional turns -children: 6,306; teachers: 5,012- produced in 12 spontaneous teaching situations which took place in Social Science classes. The situations were registered in 12 courses -4 courses of 1st grade, 4 courses of 3rd grade and 4 courses of 5th grade from elementary schools; 2 of them from rural areas and 2 from urban areas located in the Province of Córdoba (Argentina). Through a quantitative procedure, the amount, diversity and the abstraction of vocabulary that shaped the discourse of teachers during the teaching situations in 1st, 3rd and 5th grade from schools in urban and rural areas were analyzed comparatively. Besides, a scale was elaborated to measure the degree of familiarity of words used by teachers during classes. The results of this study showed that the major differences in the lexical properties of the linguistic environment to which children are exposed to all throughout the elementary school, were not found between 1st and 3rd grade, but between these two grades and 5th grade. These results did not show that the contexts of 3rd grade entail more opportunities to learn vocabulary than the environments of 1st grade. This could be attributed to the fact that exchanges in Social Science classes in 3rd grade did not show a progressive decontextualization of knowledge regarding 1st grade. Instead, the exchanges focused on concepts closely related to the children's environment and familiar vocabulary. Moreover no differences between rural and urban schools were observed. The results of this study have important pedagogical implications insofar as they highlight the need to increase opportunities for learning the vocabulary further than preschool age, since the breadth of the child's vocabulary is a predictor of the acquisition of the writing system (Goswami, 2003; Perfetti, 1992, 2007), as well as the comprehension and production of texts (Joshi, 2005; Perfetti, 2007; Protopapas, Sideridis, Mouzaki, & Simos, 2007; Sénéchal, Ouellette, & Rodney, 2006). In this sense, the primary school should be a favorable environment in which all students have during his career in the school increasingly more opportunities to listen to and, therefore, learn different, abstract and unfamiliar words.