Low motivation in using Gorontalo language for daily communication has been a major concern among the society, especially in children and adolescent in urban areas. Instructional media for early childhood has been designed as a solution to the aforementioned problem. This present study is intended to examine the effectiveness of learning instruction in improving teacher’s competency in teaching Gorontalo language for early childhood and in developing the skills of early childhood in using the language. The problems of this study revolve around the question whether or not the learning instruction for teaching Gorontalo language for early childhood can improve (1) the competency of teachers of early childhood in teaching Gorontalo language for children, and (2) the language skills of children in communicating using Gorontalo language. This experimental research involved 20 teachers of early childhood and 20 children in Gorontalo. The data were from a teacher’s competency test and ability test of children. These data were analyzed using a t-test. The calculation results show that the value of tcount is 6.7366 with the list of t-distribution on a significant level of 5% with t0.975 (19) = 2.0930. This result indicates that tcount > ttable. In other words, there is an influence of learning instruction in on teacher’s competency in teaching Gorontalo language for early childhood. This finding also implies that the effectiveness of the developed learning instruction in enhancing the teachers’ competency has been examined. The calculation result also shows that the value of tcount is 72.5904 with the list of t-distribution on the significant level 5% with t0.975 (19) = 2.1314, meaning that tcount > ttable.This finding implies that the effectiveness of the learning instruction in improving the skills of children in using Gorontalo language has been confirmed. Therefore, this study recommends that the developed learning instruction for teaching Gorontalo language is applicable to teach early childhood in Gorontalo.

Keywords : Learning Instruction, Gorontalo Language, Early Childhood.