Abstract:

The study aims to provide an insight into the Latvian language (L2) grammar of pre-school Russophone children acquiring Latvian through formal L2 instruction in a pre-school educational institution. The more difficult morphological aspects to be acquired are identified and the influence of the mother tongue explained. The participants were twelve 6-year-old bilingual children, speaking Russian (L1) and Latvian (L2), who participated in an experimental study accomplishing the author's compiled grammar test for identification of L2 receptive and productive grammar skills. The results obtained from the examination of receptive skills are better than the results of the test of the productive skills. In the study of receptive language skills, it has been concluded that children have better understanding of the agreement of the numeral and noun by gender and number, as well as negative verb forms, but worse – demonstrative pronouns and noun inflexion forms in nominative and accusative case. As regards productive skills, the pre-school children better produce the personal pronouns in nominative case and the negative verb forms, but worse – noun inflexion forms in nominative and accusative case, and preposition and noun inflexion form in genitive case, but demonstrative pronouns are not used at all. Children do not understand the grammatical correlations, they mostly pronounce the L2 separate words rather than full sentences, which can be explained by the fact that they do not manage the grammatical structures of sentences and they need a model, after which they can repeat, so they mention only the word they certainly know. Characteristically, while speaking L2, children use their mother tongue knowledge. The receptive and productive L2 grammar skills of preschoolers are compared with the grammar skills of other twelve preschoolers, who participated in the same experimental study in 2015. It has been concluded that Russophone children L2 grammar is at a very low level to acquire the study contents in Latvian at school. The input of different L2 grammatical forms is not sufficient. The very frequent use of the Latvian language is required in order to activate certain grammatical forms and morphemes and to acquire the grammar categories of the Latvian language completely and qualitatively. In future, the acquisition of L2 grammar should be more closely linked to the Latvian environment and carried out through content and language integrated learning.

Keywords:

pre-school education, second language, grammar, formal L2 instruction