Turkish Parents’ Reaction to their Children’s Errors

Abstract

There was a debate regarding first language (L1) acquisition in the area of child error question that parents are not sensitive to their children’s errors. However, some scholars believe that the reverse is true. To address these discrepancies, this study focuses on Turkish parents’ correction of their children’s errors. The data for the present study was collected from 70 parents in one of the kindergartens of Urmia, Iran. These parents were supposed to answer three main questions regarding children’s error correction: 1) What is your strategy in correcting your child errors?, 2) What kinds of errors are more common, grammatical, pronunciation or lexical?, and 3) Does each type of error lead to uptake? The results of the study revealed that parents neglected their own children’s errors and the rate and frequency of phonological errors were more than grammatical and lexical errors. However, uptake was low after parents’ reaction to the erroneous utterance produced by the children.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n51p18