Summary of “Parent-child reading in English as a second language Effects on language and literacy development of Chinese kindergarteners” 英语论文.doc

summary of “parent-child reading in english as a second language: effects on language and literacy development of chinese kindergarteners”parent-child reading, as an ideal home activity to develop childrens first language and literacy acquisition, has been explored in many aspects, including vocabulary, oral language complexity and reading skills. however, few studies focused on the causal links between parent-child reading and childrens second-language development. therefore, chows study aimed to investigate the possible effects of parent-child reading on language and literacy development in english, especially in a foreign-language context, where the foreign language is only learned for education, but not used in daily communication. compared with parents straight reading, the dialogic reading technique requires childrens active participation in communication in the home literacy activity. the positive effects of dialogic reading on childrens first-language skills, such as vocabulary and literacy skills, have been noticed and proved in the past studies. consequently, the similar influences of dialogic reading were expected on second-language acquisition. besides, chow hypothesized that childrens phonological differential ability would be enhanced with their growth of vocabulary and long exposure to the second language was also tested in the study.furthermore, previous studies have suggested that cross-linguistic transfer may overlap or enhance the first- and second-language learning in some aspects. this study aimed to provide the empirical evidence to the possibility of linguistic transfer from english as a second language to chinese as a first language.fifty-one hong kong chinese children were chosen as the subjects due to the fact that the majority of hong kong schools tend to emphasize english learning in print. even though hong kong children may begin english study at relatively early ages, they still lack the opportunity and ability in daily communication. the study might present a good method to educators and parents to improve childrens oral english at home.in the 12-week intervention programme, fifty-one hong kong 3rd-year kindergartners of normal intelligence, with the similar family situations (including parental education attainment, monthly income and parents english communicative ability), were randomly divided into three groups, the dialogic reading (dr) group, the typical reading (tr) group and the control. in the dr group, each participant parent was provided with a set of 12 english storybooks and a 1-hour training session on the peer sequence, a parent-child reading technique involving parents prompt-evaluation-expansion-repeat process to stimulate the childrens interaction in communication. participants in the tr group, using the same set of books as dr, were only requested to read as they normally would. no books or hints were provided to the control group, and the parents were asked to follow their usual pattern to read to their children. parents of dr and tr groups were asked to read the storybook twice 20 minutes each week.before and after the 12-week program, the children were tested in six measures to analyze the inter-group difference and the intra-group improvement, with the aid of three questionnaires distributed to the participant parents to collect the basic family information, childrens interest in reading and the parents feedback to the program. children of the three groups were tested about word reading, receptive vocabulary, and phonological awareness in both english and chinese.separate non-parametric kruskal-wallis and anova tests were made to compare the participants family situation, such as the demographic information, home literacy resources and practices, and childrens personal factors, which may affect the legitimacy of the test results. the results demonstrated no significant difference among the three groups. the pre-test scores of the three groups on the six measures mentioned above were also compared and still no significant differences were found among the three conditions, so that the unbiased sampling was guaranteed.the post-tests after the 12-week intervention were analyzed in two ways. first, by using repeated measure analyses, the inter-group comparison did not show the dr group, having performed interaction, made any more obvious improvement than the other two groups. the other is paired-samples t-tests to compare the pre-test and the post-test scores of the three groups for these six measures. all of the three groups had significant gains on chinese character recognition, suggesting the ability could be accumulated during the passage of time and general learning experience. besides, through data analysis, both typical reading and dialogic reading showed the potential impact on childrens ability in english word reading.however, the effects of the typical reading on english receptive vocabulary are not so impressive as those of first-language parent-child reading reported in the past studies. the inconsistence could be attributed to the less frequent interaction in english than in chinese at home, and the tendency of the overemphasis on english writing and word recognition in hong kong schools. whats more, in the dr group, five out of six abilities (except english receptive vocabulary) have showed great improvement, which supported the previous results that the dialogic reading may facilitate childrens literacy development. yet considering that the similar improvement in english word reading has also been gained by the tr group, the empirical evidence of the effects made by parent-child interaction needed further investigating.since the dialogic reading practice emphasized the daily communication and oral vocabulary, it was easy to understand the result that the dr group did not attain better performance on english receptive vocabulary. the findings also suggested that the dialogic reading in a second language may not enhance childrens receptive vocabulary as effectively as that did in the first-language acquisition, which might indicate different natures and functions of dialogic reading between the acquisition of a first language and that of a second language.in addition, the significant gains in phonological awareness in both languages in the dr group have confirmed chows hypotheses that enhanced exposure to a language can lead to the promotion of the phonological sensitivity. the findings also gave evidence to the possibility of “cross-linguistic transfer”, referring to the theory that the improvement of the foreign language will be beneficial to the first language.the limitations of the intervention study can be demonstrated from the nonsignificance of interaction effects in the inter-group comparison. the cause might be attributed to the scale of the study and the unpredictable variance in childrens foreign-language learning, such as the variations of the learning environment, and parents low proficiency in a second language. fu