Examining coherence, cohesion and sentential characteristics in the oral texts of children

This study aimed to examine coherence, cohesion and sentential characteristics in the oral texts of children at the age of 5. In the study, a survey method in a quantitative research approach was adopted and a total of 110 children at the age of 5 who enrolled in four different preschools were included as participants. The data of the study were collected through the examination of the children's oral texts. To obtain the data, two different data collection instruments were used. In order to determine sentential characteristics, Sentence and Text Examination Form was prepared by the researcher in light of the related literature and expert opinions. In addition, a rubric was developed to identify the means of coherence and cohesion including reference, ellipsis, substitution, and connectors used in the texts. This was a three-point rubric with the ratings satisfactory, acceptable, and unsatisfactory. In order to ensure reliability of the data obtained via the rubric, the inter-rater reliability was computed between the two different researchers and was found to be .94. In the data analysis process, the tape-recorded oral texts of the children were transcribed and verbatim transcriptions were analyzed via quantitative data analysis. First, short texts that were from the children's personal lives and consisted of at least eight sentences were chosen and examined with regard to sentential characteristics. Next, the same texts were evaluated based on the standards of textuality including coherence and cohesion. Last, the quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics through statistical software package. Descriptive statistics were calculated as frequencies and percentages while an independent sample t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were computed as inferential statistics. The results of the study revealed that the children mostly used nominal sentence concerning the type of the predicate, simple sentence regarding the sentence structure and regular sentence respecting the sequence of the sentence elements in their oral texts. A majority of the sentences were syntactically and grammatically acceptable. In other words, they mostly had the typical characteristics of the standard language. Oral texts were acceptable with respect to the means of cohesion whereas they were acceptable or unsatisfactory in terms of coherence. The levels of cohesion of the oral texts displayed a significant difference regarding gender and socio-economic status while they did not differ depending on the duration of preschool education. Moreover the levels of coherence showed no significant difference related to gender, socio-economic status and the duration of preschool education. In line with these results of the study, it was recommended that the focus of the language activities in preschool education institutions should be more on the problems in language acquisition. Keywords: Sentence, coherence, cohesion, language acquisition, speaking.