Abstract:

The state language of Latvia is the Latvian language. Due to its significance, a special State Research Programme called “Latvian language” was established in Latvia in 2018. One of the aims of this programme is to investigate the acquisition of Latvian language. In 2018, according to the proposal of the Ministry of Education and Science, a new educational strategy was approved in Latvia – competence-based education. It also stresses the importance of language acquisition in pre-school education and the provision of new language assessment tools for pre-school aged children. There have been some tests developed and adapted during recent years about diagnosing individual aspects of Latvian language acquisition The most professional of them are the large Phoneme Test and Test of Communicative Development, which is adapted from the popular MacArthur-Bates CDI: Communicative Development Inventory and is implemented as a parental survey. As one of the tasks in the State Research Programme is the “Acquisition of Latvian Language”, where a language assessment is planned for 5-6 year old children; the Test of Communicative Development can’t be applied, because it implements the survey of those parents whose children are between the ages of 8 months to 3 years. For an analysis of Latvian language skills and their influencing factors, the parental survey version, developed by Sharon Unsworth titled “Utrecht Bilingual Language Exposure Calculator” (UBiLEC), was also used before, which can be used as a parental survey of bilingual children of any age. If, in the last two tests, answers are given by parents, then the Phoneme Test assesses children’s speech and it is possible to find pronunciation difficulties of separate phonemes or their clusters. However, it is still not possible to assess detailed child readiness to begin studies in school in the Latvian language.

Keywords:

Latvian language, language assessment tools, language acquisition.