TEACHING THROUGH PROVERBS: THEIR EFFECT ON CHILDREN'S EXPRESSIVE AND RECEPTIVE LANGUAGE SKILLS

This study investigates the efficacy of using proverbs as a pedagogical tool to enhance expressive and receptive language skills in early childhood education. While proverbs are recognized as carriers of cultural and moral knowledge, their specific linguistic benefits in a classroom setting remain underexplored. A quasi-experimental design was implemented with 60 children aged 5-6 years from two urban primary schools. The intervention group participated in a six-week program of proverb-based activities, including storytelling, interpretation, and dramatization, while the control group followed the standard curriculum. Pre- and post-intervention assessments measured receptive vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) and expressive language skills (Formulated Sentences subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals). Results indicated that the intervention group demonstrated statistically significant gains in both receptive and expressive measures compared to the control group. Qualitative observations further suggested that the experimental group developed a greater awareness of figurative language and narrative structure. The findings suggest that integrating proverbs into early childhood curricula can be a valuable strategy for fostering nuanced language development, encouraging deeper semantic processing and more sophisticated syntactic construction.