Emergent Biliteracy Assessment Procedures used with a five-year old Chinese girl learning to read English and Chinese

The 5th International Conference on ELT in China & the 1st Congress of Chinese Applied

Linguistics, Beijing May, 2007

Ran Hu [胡冉 ]Michelle Commeyras

University of Georgia

Context

Ran Hu tutored a five-year-old Chinese child (Chaochao) to to develop her language and literacy in English and Chinese.

The primary materials were wordless picture books.

The tutoring occurred three times a week for ten weeks (approximately 30 hours.)

Research Questions

(1) What developed with the child’s oral language in English and Chinese?

(2) What developed with the child’s oral vocabulary versus reading vocabulary in English and Chinese?

(3) What developed with the child’s use of graphophonic cues when writing in English?

Summary of Tutoring Chaochao

Audiotape all the activities in each tutoring session, 3 times a week for 10 consecutive weeks.

Mondays

Greeting (E)Labeling (E&C)Picture walk (E&C)Storytelling (E&C)

Wednesdays

Greeting (E)Storytelling (E&C)Reading word Cards (E&C)Reading Biliterate Text (E & C)

FridaysGreeting (E)Storytelling (E&C)Picture finding (E&C)Word finding (E&C)Sentence making (E&C)Invented Spelling(E&C)

Assessments

Emergent Literacy Concepts of Print Directionality

English Chinese

English Alphabet Common Chinese Char

acters Common English Word

s

Chaochao’s Wordless Picture Book Stories English reading

vocabulary Chinese reading

vocabulary Dictated sentences -

invented spellings

Summary and Recommendations

Concepts About Print (Clay, 1991)

•Holding the book•Pointing to the front and the back of the book•Pointing to the beginning and the end of the sentences

1) Reading from right to left: Dian Dian see the egg is popped.

2) Reading from bottom to top: Jun Jun is very happy. Huang Huang and

Jun Jun walk away. And Dian Dian sad.

.popped is egg the see Dian Dian

Dian Dian sad.and Jun Jun walk away. AndJun Jun is very happy. Huang Huang

3) Reading left to right with a reverse sweep (snaking): Dian Dian walk away to see an egg. He is happy. The egg popping is a turtle come out.

4) Reading vertically: 点点看见军军生鸡蛋 .

Dian Dian walk away to seeis popping egg The .egg ana turtle come out.

点点看见军军生鸡蛋。

English Alphabet Recognition

From Assessment for Reading Instruction by Michael C. McKenna and Steven A. Stahl.

Result – 100% accuracy

Chinese Characters Recognition

Result – unable to read 3 characters (88%)

English reading vocabulary

Word in an index card or word in isolation assessment

Word in a sentence strip or word in context assessment

balloon

Hong Hong get elephant balloon.

English Reading Vocabulary – assessed twice in week 5 and two weeks after tutoring

Sight word vocabulary: words the child could read in isolation. 54/166 words (33%) vs. 51/252 (20%)

Context vocabulary: words the child could read in sentences. 60/166 (36%) vs. 123/252 (49%)

Oral-only vocabulary: words the child could use in storytelling but failed to read from index cards or from sentence strips. 52/166 (31%) vs. 78/252 (31%)

Chinese Reading Vocabulary - assessed once at the end of tutoring in week 10

Characters in index cards or characters in isolation assessment – Sight 183/300 (61%)

Characters in a sentence strip or characters in context assessment – Context 69/300 (23%)

Oral- only Vocabulary - 48/300 (16%)

气 球

红红有了一个红颜色的大象的气球 。

Dolch/Fry Combined High Frequency Words Dolch word lists

220 "service words" (pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and verbs) and 95 nouns which occurred again and again in children's books by Edward William Dolch.

Fry word lists Edward Fry compiled another list of 1,000 words of frequently occurring

words in English texts to be taught to students. The first 300 Fry words make up 65% of all written material contained in newspaper articles, magazines, textbooks, children's stories, novels, etc.

Dolch/Fry Combined words 157 words that are shared by both Dolch and Fry first 300 words. Ran wrote each word on an index card and asked the child to read. 28/157 – sight vocabulary (18%) Compare 18% with 33% (week 5) and 20% (end) - indicated that more sight

vocabulary was known from Chaochao’s storytelling for wordless picture books than from the Dolch/Fry list.

Invented Spelling

Chaochao had difficulty distinguishing the pronunciation of letters when they varied across words. up – rp; eye – ai; all – oo; table – taboo; dance – dns; hill – heo

The child changed the voiced and unvoiced pronunciation of “th”, into /de/ and /s/. them – dm; they – da; three – sre; thing – sing.

The child developed an understanding that the letter “c” and letter “k” both make the hard /c/ sound in some words. (2nd week, 6th week) Can – kn – cn; car – kr – cr; come – komn – com; clean – kln – clln.

Summary

Assessments linked to Wordless Picture Books: English/Chinese reading vocabularies & English invented spellings

Assessments Basics: Concepts of Print, Directionality; Alphabet, Characters & Common Words/Characters

Classroom Possibilities with Wordless Picture Books

Classroom Assessment

Wordless Picture Books Students collaborate in making up the story Teacher writes story in English and Chinese for

students to copy in notebooks. Students do repeated readings of biliteracy text. Teacher assesses with dictated sentences in

English and Chinese. Teacher calls on individual students to read

aloud sentences.