Sha Yang Learning, Design & Technology College of Education Purdue University yang304@purdue.edu

1. supporting oral narrative development of kindergarten englishlanguage learners using multimedia storybooks Sha Yang Learning, Design & Technology College of Education Purdue University yang304@purdue.edu Minchi Kim Associate professor in Learning, Design & Technology College of Education Purdue University

2. 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)?

3. 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.

4. 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).

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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

8. theoretical framework Plass and Jones’ (2005) model of second-language acquisition with multimedia

9. 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.

10. dialogic reading • A reading strategy that involvesdialogues 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

11. materials • Multimedia storybooks • Story vocabulary words • Elaborative questions

12. 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.

14. 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.