Dialogic oriented book reading for children with migration backgrounds
Creators: name: Ping, Maria Teodora
Publisher: name: Technische Universität Dortmund
Year: 2011
Subjects: subject: 370

description: This study aimed at getting an insight to the practices of dialogic oriented shared book reading, as one potential language promotion activity for children with migration backgrounds in German kindergartens. Shared book reading in Germany itself has been one common daily activity in kindergartens, yet it has unfortunately not been so much of a specific research focus to be explored. One of the notable studies to refer to when discussing shared book reading in the German context is the study conducted by Wieler (1997). On the other hand, there are a number of internationally recognized studies in the field of early childhood education which already indicated that book reading influenced the outcome measures in preschool children’s language growth, emergent literacy and reading achievement (cf. Bus et al, 1995; Hargrave and Sénéchal, 2000; De Temple &amp; Snow, 2003). Therefore, the theoretical framework under which this study was conducted was built under the claims resulted in these previous studies. The participants of this case study were five native German speaking early childhood educators (Erzieherinnen) and five groups of kindergarten children ages 3- 6 years old who were acquiring German as a second language. The educators were given a specific picture book and generally instructed to perform “dialogic oriented book reading”. The reading sessions were videotaped with the consent of the kindergartens and the parents of the participating children. The obtained videotaped data were transcribed by native German speakers and then further analysed by using a qualitative content analysis method. The analysis process in this study was conducted to find: 1) An overview of the observed shared book reading practices; 2) Forms of interactions during the observed shared book reading, and 3) Educator’s strategies and children’s behaviours during the interactions. The instruments for the data analysis were two sets of coding schemes (for categorising and analysing educator’s strategies and children’s behaviours) which were developed by adapting the coding scheme and evaluation framework previously developed by DeBruin- Parecki (1999), Reese et al (2003) and Dickinson et al (2003). The reliability of the developed coding schemes in this study was tested by using Cohen’s Kappa for measuring intercoder reliability. For educators’ strategies categories, the computed Cohen Kappa’s value was 0.773, which could be interpreted as reaching a “substantial agreement”. While, for children’s behaviours coding categories, the Cohen Kappa’s value was 0.793 that indicated as well a substantial agreement. The results of the analysis indicated that the participating educators utilized considerably different reading styles even though receiving the same instructions. Their attempts of practicing the so-called “dialogic book reading” as prescribed by researchers such as Whitehurst (1992) revealed examples of different other reading styles. Some of the features and strategies of dialogic book reading, such as the PEER (Prompt- Expand- Evaluate- Recall) and CROWD (Completion Prompts- Recall Prompts- Open Ended Prompts- Wh Prompts- Distancing Prompts) appeared during the videotaped sessions. However, one most important point particular to dialogic book reading, i.e. the active role of the children to become the story teller, was missing in all observed cases. Furthermore, some educators performed more closely to what was defined as an “interactive book reading”, a reading situation in which an adult reads a book to a child or a small group of children and uses a variety of techniques to engage the children in the text (cf. Trivette &amp; Dunst, 2007). There were three forms of interactions observed during the shared book reading sessions, namely: 1) educator- child (one-to-one) interaction, 2) peer interaction (between and among children) and 3) group (educator- children) interaction. The observed educator’s strategies were categorized as “instructional strategies” and “personal- management strategies”. The instructional strategies mostly employed by the participating educators were “naming and labelling” and giving feedback in forms of “confirmation”. While, the educator’s personal- management strategies were related to handling personal interaction with children, managing floor selection as well as maintaining children’s interests. The findings concerning children’s behaviours indicated that children mainly gave “responses” to educators’ strategies and their peers behaviours. They also showed several “self-initiated behaviours”. Furthermore, the most frequently coded children’s responses were: “naming and labelling”, “confirmation” and “contradiction/ correction”. While, the most frequently coded children’s self-initiations were: “naming and labelling”, “asking questions” and “picture description”. In addition to the abovementioned findings, it was also found from the study that most of the participating educators applied strategies which could be considered as “low cognitive level”, in other words the strategies which did not require further thinking skills such as inferring or reasoning (cf. Moschovaki &amp; Meadows, 2005). Consequently, the children also responded in the similar cognitive level. Regarding the educators’ language use, to some extent they made use of “decontextualized language- in which the educators tried to connect the story to the children’s lives and experiences, to demonstrate and ask about world/ general knowledge, to explain word definitions and concepts, as well as to infer and make predictions (cf. Morgan &amp; Goldstein, 2004). Moreover, from the observed sequences of interactions, some evidences of potential learning situations were detected. The educators provided input in forms of vocabulary instruction (for instance introducing new words and concepts). They also corrected children’s language use. Interestingly, in this case study, the participating children were also observed to exhibit simple forms of co-construction in terms of discussing words and concepts with their peers. Eventually, this study provided empirically based evidences on how practices of dialogic book reading might look like in kindergartens. The findings of the study revealed what strategies the early childhood educators might have been able to employ and how they employed the strategies. Moreover, the findings also showed how children who were still acquiring a second language could participate given the dialogic or interactive reading situation. Thus, these findings are expected to give theoretical and methodological contributions to the existing studies concerning adult- child shared book reading as well as to practically support the improvement of language promotion programs in Germany. Nevertheless, due to the limitation of the study, some recommendations for further study are also made, especially related to such issues as research design and generalizability of the results.