EESTI KEELT TEISE KEELENA OMANDAVATE 7–8-AASTASTE LASTE KODUSEST KEELEKESKKONNAST JA EESTI KEELE OSKUSEST
THE HOME LANGUAGE ENVIRONMENT AND ESTONIAN SKILLS OF 7–8-YEAR OLD CHILDREN ACQUIRING ESTONIAN AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Summary/Abstract: This article gives the first overview of the language environment and Estonian skills of 423 students from multilingual classes who participated in the pilot project “Professional Estonian teacher in high school”. About half of the students in the sample had homes where only Russian was spoken to them, 1/4 came from monolingual Estonian homes and the rest from homes with a combination of Estonian and Russian and/or another language. Students with a foreign home language come into contact with Estonian at school and via TV, computers and books. Most of the children from non-Estonian homes start hearing Estonian input when they enter daycare (around age 3). Children who have received input in Estonian for a longer period also had better communication skills in Estonian, on average. The results also indicated that less than half of the children who speak Russian at home were not able to speak Estonian or understood it only when it was spoken to them very slowly and clearly. The data also showed that the general communication skills of Russian-Estonian bilingual children lag behind the skills of similarly aged monolingual Estonian students, though they have more developed skills than children who speak only Russian at home.

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