Lexical availability in children in Parts of the body and alignment with foreign language learning standards

Abstract

This article shows a study of lexical availability in which a total of 420 surveys have been carried out on children aged 7, 9 and 11 within the center of interest "parts of the body". The research has two great novelties, on the one hand, the large number of informants that makes the results significant and, on the other hand, that the informants are children. The sample classified by age groups and by type of center is offered, it is compared with the contents of works that are considered standards of language teaching-learning and it is shown that there are great dissonances between the proposals of these works and the real lexical availability of children of 7, 9 and 11 years. Lexical cohesion is also studied according to the features of age, gender sex and school place. It is highlighted that the linguistic maturity of the students must be taken into account to establish the level of language acquisition. The research serves as a starting point to be able to integrate foreign students who do not have knowledge of the target language and who join a nursery or primary classroom once the course has started.