Abstract:

Topicality:
In Latvia, amendments to the Education Law (Grozījumi 2018/65.1) provide for a gradual transition to education in the official language, i.e. Latvian in minority educational institutions. A new bilingual education model will be introduced in grades 1-6, ensuring that at least 50 percent of the study contents is in Latvian (L2) in 2019/2020. Although in pre-schools, starting from the age of five, new education guidelines will be introduced in 2019/2020 school year, providing for a bigger role of the Latvian language in the study process, at present there is a great number of 6-year-olds who studied L2 through pre-school programs adopting formal L2 instruction with 2 and 3 classes per week (10-30 min). Therefore, it is important to explore L2 proficiency level of those children before they enter primary education.

Aim:
The purpose of the present study is to investigate the lexical competence of children acquiring Latvian through formal L2 instruction in a pre-school educational institution, find out problems and develop recommendations for acquisition of L2 vocabulary adapted to the child’s needs and the situation in Latvia.
Data and analysis. The participants were twelve 6-year-old bilingual children, speaking Russian (L1) and Latvian (L2), who participated in an experimental study accomplishing three tests developed by the author. Preschool L2 lexical competence was assessed calculating the word tokens and utterance types in proficiency test of receptive/productive vocabulary, picture description talk and dialogue talk. Their lexical competence was compared with the L2 vocabulary of other twelve senior preschoolers, who participated in the same experimental study in 2015. The data on the integration of the Latvian language throughout the pedagogical process were obtained through the questionnaire intended for the pre-school teachers. The interview was used to obtain more detailed information from the Latvian language teacher.

Conclusions:
It has been concluded that L2 lexical competence in 2018 is similar to 2015 at a very low level to acquire the study contents in Latvian at school. The research participants’ L2 receptive vocabulary knowledge is better than productive vocabulary knowledge. The words with a similar form and meaning in both languages, most commonly – cognate words, facilitate the acquisition of L2 lexical units. The prevalence of one word utterances in preschoolers’ monologue speech and dialogue speech is determined by the limitations of the research participants’ language tools. The most commonly used parts of speech are nouns and verbs, the least – particles, prepositions, numerals. It is difficult for children to use the proper forms of nouns, pronouns and verbs to make agree them in gender, number and inflexion. The use of L1lexemes instead of L2 shows the children’s wish to communicate in Latvian. In incompletely spoken utterances, there are both interlingual and intralingual transfer errors. The Russophone preschoolers’ L2 input and L2 output are not sufficient and do not contribute to the acquisition of the L2 vocabulary. Little contact with the Latvian language and the input, which is not always authentic, affect the L2 use and quality. In future, the process of teaching L2 vocabulary in pre-school educational establishments should be more closely linked to the Latvian environment and carried out through content and language integrated learning.

Keywords:

pre-school education, second language, lexical competence, formal L2 instruction