BLOG ENTRY #11 Research Article: The relationship between children's spontaneous utterances during joint bookreading and their retellings

Kim,Y., Kang, J.Y., & Pan,B.A. (2011). The relationship between children's spontaneous utterances during joint bookreading and their retellings. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 11: 402.

This research article aims at investigating the relationship between low SES children's spontaneous utterances during joint bookreading with their parents and their retelling skills and results. The authors have targeted 62 mothers of low socioeconomic status and their preschool-aged children, and videotaped their joint bookreading with the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Carl, 1983).

The findings of the article have suggested that the preschool children’s story retelling quality and skills are closely related to their active participation and spontaneous utterances during the joint bookreading with an adult: the more spontaneous utterances a child produce during joint bookreading, the higher quality the story retelling based on the book would be. How we define a “spontaneous utterance” then? I am very impressed by the categories this article provides, and find it very helpful for us teachers or parents to evaluate a child’s performance during the joint bookreading, so we will know whether the child needs more encouragement or support on which aspect of active participation. (It could be a good rubric for joint bookreading spontaneous utterances. Shared below)

Children’s spontaneous utterances were categorized as follows:

. Vocabulary/labeling. Utterances about name of objects, or definition of a word (e.g.‘What is a cocoon?’, ‘This is the big leaf.’)

. Event and description. Utterances about description of the story, actions of the character, or events in the story (e.g. ‘He popped out of the egg.’, ‘He was fat now.’)

. Evaluation. Utterances that provide a perspective on actions and events in the story such as references to thoughts and feelings of characters about events (e.g. ‘This is a sad story.’, ‘Oh my goodness. He is gonna be fat.’).

. Interpretive questions/information. Utterances that interpret or paraphrase story lines (e.g.‘Why he got tummy ache?’, ‘That [butterfly] is what he wanted to turn into?’,‘I don’t like salami.’)

. Repetition of mother’s utterances (e.g. Mother: ‘What did he eat?. . . one apple.’ Child:‘One apple.’)

            The findings above suggest the importance of acknowledging, and encouraging and reinforcing children’s active participation in bookreading interactions, beyond simply responding to adult questions, which makes me think, as pre-k literacy educators, maybe we should put more attention to encourage the children to do active thinking, but not to focus on teaching them how to think by throwing out evaluate-related questions, although some kind of scaffolding is necessary.

After reading the article, I am very much persuaded that for pre-k children, story retelling is one of the most important skills to get for children, and to accomplish that, teachers, along with parents, should create a not only literacy-rich environment, but also an supportive and encouraging atmosphere to build on children’s spontaneous verbal contributions to joint bookreading with adults.

BLOG ENTRY#10 Interactive Read-Aloud

After reading chapter 6, Interactive Read-Aloud: Talking Our Way Through Texts, I learned about the three most important factors for a successful and interactive read-aloud for children:

1.     Carefully selected texts for clearly defined instructional purposes based on student’s needs

2.     Time provided for meaningful conversation around these texts by teachers and students

3.     Expressive oral reading (performance of  the reader)

The first point seems simple, since during the past decades, a huge amount of quality children’s books have been created, covering the topics of different cultures, arts, lifestyles, history, nature, animals and all kinds of stuffs you can think of. Proper books for instruction can be found by recommendation list online or books. Teacher needs to sort them into categories that are ready to use.

Second, the talk part is very beneficial for English language learners and struggling students. By giving the chance to hear peers talking about the book’s vocabulary and other knowledge, the ELLs are provided a strong language model. By asking open-ended questions, teachers are able to trigger students’ deep thinking of the texts, and encourage them to think like a proficient reader step by step.

Third, the performance of the teacher is also very important. Children are easily attracted to the voice, the emotions and expressions of the teacher when s/he reading aloud a stories. And the more the children are attracted, the more they will listen, the more they will be thinking about the texts. The performance is rather important, but it takes practice to make perfect.

Simply put, for a good read-aloud, the teacher needs to choose a set of good books, encouraging meaningful conversations by asking questions before, during and after the read-aloud, and to perform the read-aloud with proper tones, emotions, expressions, gestures, etc. As a future educator, I feel these three points are important but takes time to accomplish beautifully. During my internship, I have been watching the teachers read aloud to the children. Some teachers are very expressive and try to engage children into discussions and conversations during the reading, while some teacher just read off the book without leaving time for children to think about the text. I prefer the former read aloud style but understand that a good read-aloud takes practice and the knowledge of what the children need and are interested in. I am looking forward to reading more in the future with children.

Blog Entry#9 Research Article post: Dual-language books as an emergent-literacy resource: Culturally and linguistically responsive teaching and learning

Naqvi, R., McKeough,A., Thorne,K., &Pfitscher,C.(2013). Dual-language books as an emergent-literacy resource: Culturally and linguistically responsive teaching and learning. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 13(4) 501–528.

This article is about reaching on the potentially effective teaching practice of dual-language book reading in culturally and linguistically diverse elementary classrooms. The authors have analyzed culturally and linguistically responsive teaching and learning in dual-language book reading by conducting a 3-year research project in kindergartens in Canada. The aim of the research was to identify linguistically and culturally responsive teaching in DLB (dual-language books) reading contexts and to document its effect on children’s linguistic, metalinguistic and cultural engagement.

At first I was attracted to the title of the article, because I am very interested in dual-language teaching. I think teaching English language learners with DLBs is a not new, but interesting enough idea to try out. And I was glad to read that there are increasing numbers of DLBs in many languages. Among these books, there are folk tales, children’s classics, popular picture books, picture dictionaries and other nonfiction books. I have seen some of the Chinese version of the popular picture books such as Guess how much I love you, The very Hungry Caterpillar,and so on, but before reading this article I never thought of using these translated version of books to teach English to English language learners. I used to think that teaching a new language is to put the children completely in an environment of that language, so they could learn to think and communicate in that target language other than their first language.  However, reading this article makes me think: should teachers allow some space for ELL’s first language when exposing them to English, especially for emergent language learners?

If the answer is yes, then the practice can be tricky. Although I like the idea of using DLBs with ELLs, I do not appreciate the method of practice in the research, in which teachers and volunteer teachers read the DLBs in four languages: English, French, Urdu and Punjabi with children. Though they claim that they only use English and one other language in each session of reading aloud, I still find the process of communication between the teachers and children very confusing. In one session, the volunteer read Punjabi and the teacher read English off the same book but different language. The volunteer reads Punjabi and some of the kids who speaks Punjabi responded every now and then, in the meantime, the English teacher stops and let the volunteer read most of the story and engage with the children. I was so confused because I think this should be a dual language class, but turned into a Punjabi class! It is also ridiculous that sometimes the English teacher, who also speaks French, would interact with French with children in the reading! I must say I cannot appreciate the practice presented in the article, because it clearly excludes and confuses the other children who do not speak Punjabi, and though the Indian kids who speak Punjabi responded actively to the reading, they are deprived of the opportunity to engage in English learning.

            I feel in order to make this DLBs idea work well with emergent English language readers, to me, a more satisfying teaching practice could be created. Off the top of my head, I would suggest using DLBs together but not in the same session. Maybe teacher can use the other language (ex.Chinese) with children first, and when they get a little familiar with that book, teachers could present the English version with children, read it to them, compare it with the Chinese version they know, expand their vocabulary through the comparison and so on. Or even read the English version first, and send the Chinese version home and let the parents read with the children. Anyway, I think I could use more ideas and advice on the practice methods of teaching ELLs with DLBs!

To summarize, I like the idea presented in the article that providing young linguistic-minority children with multilingual literacy experience, in the form of read-aloud DLBs can enable them to use their linguistic and cultural capital within mainstream classrooms, however, I am not satisfied with the practice included

Blog Entry #8 Reading Assessment

           After reading Chapter 10 of Catching Readers Before They Fall (Johnson & Keier, 2010), I found myself more excited and confident about the upcoming early childhood literacy teaching. The reason is that this chapter has provided me so many questions to consider as well as so many good ideas to try out in practice.

I used to think that children are developing all by their own, and as teachers, you just need to plan and provide the environment for them to grow, especially when it comes to literacy learn. But now I cannot even agree with this thought, because emergent readers, does not grow into proficient all naturally, on the contrast, it requires lots of teacher’s guide and support, which come from all kinds of ongoing assessment. In this chapter, the authors states the reason why reading assessment is critical children: using the results of the assessments, teachers can better identify what are the problems in a reader’s literacy processing system, which strategies need to be taught to facilitate their text decoding, what is the next step to help the reader better comprehend the texts, etc. All of the above are significant questions to ask when teach reading, so we teachers can adjust strategies and teaching goals to meet every reader’s needs, especially for the struggling ones.

          I really like that the authors have provided information of many useful, formal or informal assessment tools to use with children, including Conferences, Anecdotal Note-Taking Opportunities (informal), Running Records, Developmental Reading Assessment 2, and Beginning Reader Assessments (formal). I feel like the assessments could be very effective and individualized when using informal and formal assessment tools together, just like comparing qualitative study and quantitative study on the same topic and it often seems to make more sense. For example, when assess a child’s reading abilities, use Conferences to see if the child comprehending the text, if s/he uses any strategic action to understand the text, if s/he enjoys reading,etc, in the meantime, use Running Records to see the child’s strategic behavior and information about what level text is appropriate for the child.

          All in all, effective assessments help teachers make appropriate decisions on the next steps of teaching literacy to a specific child. I found this article very informative and helpful for literacy teachers and want to try to use the tools in my future teaching.