Bilingual Children and School-Readiness

Abstract

The research featured the development of intellectual skills and voluntary sphere in the context of schoolreadiness in preschoolers at bilingual day care centers. The control group included Russian-speaking children from ordinary kindergartens. The authors believe bilingualism to be a means of cognitive and communicative development. Bilingual children require a special approach in school-readiness assessment. Two blocks of methods were used to measure the intellectual readiness and the development of voluntary sphere. The bilingual preschoolers demonstrated a higher level of voluntary attention in comparison with the control group. The bilingual children were much better at converting visual information than the children from the Russian-speaking group. The article also introduces some significant links between various aspects of preschoolers' mental development. The results of the diagnostic methods correlated with each other and made it possible to analyze the development of memory and voluntary attention in cognition tests.