The ways that children implement social and communication skills in peer-group interaction provide the foundation for successful later life adjustment. In this study, the focus was to find out the discourse competence of college students as basis for the development of the social-communicative competence in the early childhood education. This made use of the Descriptive research design which utilized a picture-cue writing ability test. The data indicate that the respondents’ discourse competence (writing) test is described as average. Further analysis of the results suggests that the respondents have major problems in sentence construction rules; error on grammar or word order is fairly frequent. This implies that the respondents have difficulty deducing the connection between ideas. They seem to experience frequent use of wrong or inappropriate words. Expression of ideas is limited because of inadequate vocabulary. They lack the repertoire of words and they have limited knowledge of the English structure.

discourse competence, social-communicative competence, childhood education, content, organization, language used, vocabulary, mechanics