SUPPORTING ORAL NARRATIVE DEVELOPMENT OF KINDERGARTEN ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS USING MULTIMEDIA STORYBOOKS

Sha YangLearning, Design & TechnologyCollege of EducationPurdue Universityyang304@purdue.edu

Minchi KimAssociate professor in Learning, Design & TechnologyCollege of EducationPurdue University

RESEARCH QUESTIONS How could teachers of English as a Second Language

use multimedia storybooks to foster oral narrative development of kindergarten English language learners (ELLs)?

RATIONALE FOR THIS PAPER The National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children

and Youth has identified English oral proficiency as a critical area for language-minority children (August & Shanahan, 2006).

Narrative ability facilitates oral language skills and precedes literacy for bilingual students (August & Shannahan, 2006; Oller & Pearson, 2002; Stadler & Ward, 2005).

In previous studies, children viewed multimedia storybooks alone without any support or interaction with adults in the form of questions or comments.

Lack of research on how teachers could use multimedia storybooks to support oral narrative development of ELLs.

TARGET POPULATION Bilingual children can make significant progress in oral

English from kindergarten to 1st grade (Uccelli & Páez, 2007). Kindergarten ELLs’ oral English proficiency predicts their

later English reading achievement (Kieffer, 2008).

WHAT IS MULTIMEDIA STORYBOOK

Multimedia storybooks are electronic storybooks that “present children’s literature with text and illustrations similar to a traditional text and also include elements designed to enhance the reading experience for beginning readers” (Lefever-Davis & Pearman, 2005, p. 446).

Examples: Just Grandma and Me, Ugly Duckling, Alice in Wonderland, The Princess and the Pea, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

The pictures are retrieved from http://diabeteslight.com/a-poem-for-tuesday-the-princess-and-the-pea/ and http://ramadhaniwulansari.blogspot.com/2011/07/ugly-duckling.html respectively.

WHY USE MULTIMEDIA STORYBOOKS FOR ELLS

Visual support Verbal and nonverbal information conveyed simultaneously Repeated encounters Research has shown that both ELLs and non-ELLs benefit

from viewing multimedia storybooks in emergent literacy development.

NARRATIVE SKILLS Narrative is “one method of recapitulating past experience

by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred” (Labov, 1972, pp. 359-360).

Key dimensions of narrative skills include (Level & Sénéchal, 2011; Schneider, Dubé, & Hayward, 2005; Uchikoshi, 2005):

story structure contextual knowledge cohesion knowledge evaluation storybook language syntactic complexity

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Plass and Jones’ (2005) model of second-language acquisition with multimedia

Apperception: select some verbal information and visual tools from all the material to draw learners’ attention and facilitate their comprehension of the whole material.

Comprehension: the processes of organizing words and images into verbal and visual models.

Intake: the integration of the verbal and visual models with multimedia-supported approaches.

Comprehensible output: use of language in meaningful contexts.

DIALOGIC READING

A reading strategy that involves dialogues between an adult and a child during book reading and prepares a child to be a story teller.

Main techniques Using elaborative “wh-” and open-ended questions Repeating child’s good answers Modifying child’s utterances Expanding his/her incomplete responses

MATERIALS

Multimedia storybooks Story vocabulary words Elaborative questions

TECHNOLOGY-SUPPORTED ESL CLASS

Apperception The teacher introduces vocabulary words with cards.

Comprehension The teacher reinforces vocabulary learning through raising questions using the images in the multimedia storybook.

Intake and comprehensible output The teacher uses dialogic reading techniques to raise elaborative questions about the story plot and respond to each child’s answers.

Activity Questions

Step 1: Go over vocabulary and provide definitions Frighten Bloom Selfish

 

Step 2: Watch the story once without pause

 

Step 3: Vocabulary #2Watch the story the 2nd time, and pause at the slide when raising a question about a word. Children are expected to speak out the word.

Frighten 

(Pause at the slide with wall and door)How did the child feel when the giant shouted?

Bloom 

(Pause at the slide with trees, a boy and bushes)What happened to the flowers after the giant put the boy up on a branch of the tree?

Selfish 

(Pause at the slide with the giant alone)What kind of person do you think the giant is?

Step 4: Watch the story the 3rd time, try a few interactive activities, and pause at the specific slide where the question comes from and raise the question after the narration of the slide.  

Why do you think the children liked to play in the garden?How did the children feel when the giant shouted?What did they do then?Why did the giant decide to share his garden?What did the giant learn from not sharing his garden?What things do you not like to share?What happens if you choose not to share?Spontaneous questioning: who, what, when where, why and how questions.

FUTURE RESEARCH

What modifications are needed to the proposed approach.

How to modify this approach for regular kindergarten program where both ELLs and non-ELLs will benefit from.

How to provide both native language support and English support in developing ELLs’ oral narrative ability.