Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Need for the study
For the past decades, with the economic globalization, the integration of culture and thefurther integration of the world, China’s society has attached more importance to childrenEnglish education than ever before. In many developed cities, such as Beijing, Shenzhen andShanghai, children are required to learn English at a very young age even at three or fouryears old. Also, more and more kindergartens offer English courses to toddlers. Even someearly learning centers offer bilingual teaching environment and foreign teachers for childrenwithin ten months to three years old, which put forward new requirements for children’sEnglish literacy.
With regard to the second language acquisition, famous linguistics D.A. Wilkins claimedthat “Without grammar, very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary, nothing can beconveyed” (Lewis, 1993, p.16). It indicates the importance of vocabulary in language learningand literacy development. When children are learning the second language, vocabulary is thefirst problem they need to face. They need to master enough vocabulary, which can make itpossible for them to listen, speak, read and write in second language. In other words,vocabulary acquisition is one of the most important bases of literacy development of children.
As for today, input in various modalities is now being used in language teaching becausemultiple modalities are believed to improve language acquisition. Semingson also claimedthat nowadays there were multiple ways that mobile devices and digital tools can serve toenhance early development, when used strategically and thoughtfully (2017). The followingideas include digital tools and activities, such as e-books, alphabet-learning games, andstorytelling apps, which can be used to enhance early literacy development. Besides that,television, video and film are traditionally seen as a possible source of language input and theuse of television and film in language teaching was discussed already in the 1960s(Corder,1966). Watching TV is the dominant activity of Chinese children today and thousandsof educational programs are targeted at preschool children. Many researches have proved thatchildren can learn something useful from the educational programs. Rush (2001) stated thatinfants can learn novel words through repeated exposure to an infant-directed DVD with thehelp of parent mediation. Especially for infants aged four to twenty-four months, theinfant-directed DVD does significantly increase their ability to learn novel words whencompared to children who have not seen the DVD. Furthermore, according to researchfindings over the past 30 years, even preschoolers can learn successfully with the help oftelevision (Fisch, 2004). In spite of these positive results, only a few studies, however, havefocused on the possible use of educational television programs in foreign language learningand the language component of themselves. Whether the content of the educational programcould be used in foreign language learning, especially in vocabulary learning? What methodsdoes it use when presenting the vocabulary? Does it contain some knowledge about emergentliteracy? These are the questions that motivate this study.
......................
1.2 Structure of the thesis
This thesis is comprised of five chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction to the thesis,which states the need and significance of the study. Chapter two defines the basic conceptsand terms related to the study. Simultaneously, the literature reviews about early literacydevelopment and vocabulary teaching and learning are presented in this part. Chapter threeintroduces the sampling method and research questions of the data, also illustrates theresearch methods with specific theoretical framework the study used. Chapter four reports thefindings considering vocabulary and emergent literacy knowledge found in the data and themethods used when presenting vocabulary. After that, this thesis evaluates the languagecomponent of the Chinese version of Dora the Explorer combining qualitative andquantitative methods. Chapter five is the conclusion, reviewing the major findings andmaking further discussion compared with existing theoretical issues. Finally, the thesis putsforward the limitations and offers some suggestions for further study.
......................
Chapter 2 Basic Concepts and Literature Review
2.1 Basic concepts
2.1.1 Definition of a word and vocabulary
Any human language is made up of words. Words as the tools of talk that makecommunication with others possible. Also, the words are considered to be the language units.Children begin with using nouns for naming objects in first language acquisition and otherwords to express their wants and needs. Therefore, words are the first thing a child learnswhen beginning to acquire a language (Clark, 1994).
In order to study the issue of teaching words, one must first define the constitution of aword. The task is not a simple one for linguistics has different views on this issue.Merriam-Webster Dictionary (online version, 2018) defines a word as “a speech sound orseries of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning usually without beingdivisible into smaller units capable of independent use”. It continues with the definition as“the entire set of linguistic forms produced by combing a single base with various inflectionalelements without change in the part of speech elements”.
This definition is used as the basis when defining a word in this study. In addition,Thornbury (2007, p.3) categorized the words by word class. Based on his theory, words canbe classified as: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions anddeterminers, which is used as the method of classifying words in this study.
Except that, vocabulary is another crucial term in this study. The online dictionary ofMerriam-Webster (2018) defines it as “a list or collection of words or of words and phrasesusually alphabetically arranged”. In other words, all existing words of a language make up itsvocabulary. Also, vocabulary has moved to center stage in foreign language teaching. AsNation (1993) claimed that vocabulary knowledge enabled language use, language use enabled the increase of vocabulary knowledge.
.....................
2.2 Literature review
2.2.1 Early literacy development
Children acquire language, and then go on to the acquisition of literacy. Language is a system, a network, not just a random group of elements, which have no connection. Theelements of language are related to each other in a structured way. Also, language is acquireddevelopmentally (Dorit, 1992). According to Dorit’s study, when a child is born until it isabout six weeks old, it just cries and makes indistinguishable sounds. Then, between the sixthand tenth month, they start babbling, putting sounds together. Eventually when they arebetween five and ten years old, they begin to acquire discourse. Also, according to Anthony(2018) by the age of three, most children have considerable experience with language. Theycan understand most sentences, understand the use of basic prepositions (e.g., on, in, under),and use pronouns such as I, you, we, and they, along with some plurals. After children acquirethe language to a certain extent, they are taught about literacy. In this point of view,vocabulary is the basis of language and literacy development.
Literally, “literacy” is defined as the state of being able to read and write. “Socially,literacy provides people with opportunities to share meanings across space and time.Cognitively, literacy requires that individuals use specific skills and knowledge about how thewritten language operates in processing text” (Cameron, 2005). In the past, literacy of youngchildren was closely tied to physical and mental maturation, because it was believed thatyoung children need to reach a certain level of intelligence and develop someperceptual-motor skills in order to succeed in literacy. However, based on the concept ofemergent literacy, literacy development of children begins much earlier than previouslybelieved (Christie, 2003). The study of Inan (2010) also demonstrated this point of view, inwhich emergent literacy represented the children’s growing explorations about print. Inanmade an inquiry-based case study to describe literacy development of an English secondlanguage preschooler. He made some experimental measurement to a girl of three years and ahalf old. The tasks involved were: concepts about print, writing vocabulary, hearing andrecording sounds in words, word reading, letter identification and two analyzed runningrecords. Finally, he found that the little girl practiced many behaviors that mature readers andwriters did. In most of the tasks, as an ESL child, she showed her complete competence inreading and writing in English. She usually used a method to identify words when shehesitated. In other words, emergent literacy begins before children possessing proficientliteracy skills.
......................
Chapter 3 Research Methodology................................ 14
3.1 Research questions...........................14
3.2 Research methods..........................15
Chapter 4 Results and Discussions...........................21
4.1 English vocabulary in the data...........................21
4.1.1 Nouns.......................... 22#p#分页标题#e#
4.1.2 Verbs.............................24
Chapter 5 Conclusion.............................. 56
5.1 Dora the Explorer offers a quite good input for children’s second languagevocabulary development............................... 56
5.2 Dora the Explorer offers relatively abundant instructional methods whenteaching vocabulary............................... 58
Chapter 4 Results and Discussions
4.1 English vocabulary in the data
When considering what counts as a word, a decision was made to count tokens. Thereason of doing so is to make the analysis more precise and record the vocabulary as many aspossible. This means that every occurrence of a word is counted, and the plural forms anddifferent tenses of words are seen as individual words. What’s more, the target audiences ofthe program are small children; it seemed reasonable to separate the inflected forms from theheadwords because this is easier for preschool children to perceive especially when theyencountered with irregular inflections.
After finding out all English vocabulary items in the data, the words were categorized byword class. As above mentioned, there are ten groups that are used to analysis: nouns,pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, chunks andmiscellaneous words. Chunks included such phases that could not be analyzed separately andalways be used together as an entirety. The group of miscellaneous words includes words thatdose not belong to any other groups, for example, numbers and interjections. Furthermore, insome cases the same form of a word was used in different ways to convey different meanings and it was therefore possible to one form be categorized into several groups. Finally, after allthe word occurrences were recorded, the different types of the words were picked out. In thisway, the amount of different words that the data contained could be verified.
The results are presented by frequency: the group that had the most occurrences isdiscussed first and so forth. Every occurrence of the same word was counted to indicate thetotal amount of occurrences. The results indicate how many times members of each group arepresent in the data. Figure 4-1 illustrates the results by frequency.
....................
Chapter 5 Conclusion
5.1 Dora the Explorer offers a quite good input for children’s secondlanguage vocabulary development
The amount of English vocabulary found in the data was numerous and 3 or 4 corevocabulary appeared in each episode. English words and phrases occurred 5,096 times in total.The data contained fifteen episodes, on average, about 340 English words or phrases occurredin each episode. After eliminating the repetitions, there were 262 different vocabularies intotal and 17 words or phrases in each episode on average. On the other hand, most of thewords found in the sampled data have concrete meanings, which were regarded as suitable forchildren to learn.
Word class categorized the vocabulary items, and then the amount of each category wasrepresented. The most frequently occurring group was nouns, followed by verbs, pronouns,miscellaneous words, adverbs, adjectives, determiners, chunks, conjunctions and prepositions.According to Gairns and Redman (1986), concrete items should be easier to learn than wordswith abstracts meanings. Furthermore, the target audiences of the data are preschool childrenwho had probably not studied English before. As a result, most of nouns in the data haveconcrete meanings. Other groups such as verbs and adjectives are usually easy to be learnedby children, which ranked in second and sixth place respectively. In total, the data presented91 different nouns, 49 different verbs and 26 different adjectives. As for adverbs, even thoughit occupies the fifth place and categorized as content words, they have not very concretemeanings and are difficult to be presented. The relative high frequency of adverbs is due to the occurrences of there (79), right (63), no (36), yes (20).
What’s more, Allen and Vallette had claimed, “Neither young nor older students havetrouble in leaning numbers, days of the week, colors, names of objects and the like” (1972,p.114). As for the data, numbers were categorized into the group of miscellaneous words,while the colors were counted as adjectives. And these two groups ranked in fourth and sixthplace respectively. The amount of numbers 225 accounts for 54% of the total occurrences ofmiscellaneous words. And the words about color were found 81 times. These words and theconcrete meaning words were both easier to be learned by young learners.
reference(omitted)
