Language and Communication Achievements of Two, Three and Four Years Old Children in Childcare Centre

Abstract

Language and communication development for young children consist of four components, which are vocabulary, syntax, semantic, and communication. The purpose of this study is to determine language and communication achievements of 2, 3 and 4 years old children. This study involves 1000 children from 65 childcare centers in one of the states in Malaysia. This study uses a survey method, by using National Database to identify language and communication development of 2+, 3+, and 4+ years old children. Findings of 2 years old indicate a low performance in all components. Only 17.9 percent of them has achieved the skills of make a sentence using two words (syntax). The findings for 3 years old children indicate that 50% to 60% attained the achievement’s standard. However, only 50.6 percent of the children in this study has achieved the skills of using two to three words in a sentence. Findings for 4 years old children indicate that not more than 50% of children attained the achievement’s standard required. The result also highlighted that the lowest achievement of communication that is 17.9 percent for 4 years old children. Overall results from this study, found that children are behind their achivement standard in all components of language and communication when compared to the achievement standard for their age group. Therefore, the implication of this study is to focus on the teachers and parents involvement to support childrens’ language development as they are very much involved in childrens’ early years of development. Teachers need to be trained on how to create language rich environment, initiate interactive conversation, and reading time with children in the classroom. On the other hand, parents need to communicate more with their children through daily activities and have reading time as a routine at home.