Abstract
The main theme of this article is examining the active role that young English language learners (ELLs) play in making important choices that affect their own language learning and research participation. I will consider the growing emphasis in child Second Language Acquisition (SLA) on the importance of exploring children’s perspectives about their participation in research and English language development as a second language. The first part of this article discusses the new paradigm in child SLA, which takes note of the voices of young children in research rather than overlooks their agency in favor of an adult perspective, while the second part describes an exploratory case study of a 5-year-old Korean-English learner and illustrates how a very young ELL makes decisions as an active research participant in engaging English storybooks as self-access resources in the child’s spontaneous play at home.
Highlights
In early September 2013, I moved from South Korea (Korea hereafter) to England to take the one-year Master program in English Language Teaching
The first part of this article discusses the new paradigm in child Second Language Acquisition (SLA), which takes note of the voices of young children in research rather than overlooks their agency in favor of an adult perspective (Pinter, 2014), while the second part describes a case study of a 5-year-old KoreanEnglish learner and illustrates how a very young English language learners (ELLs) makes decisions as an active research participant in engaging with English storybooks as self-access resources in the child’s spontaneous play at home
In order to preserve the balance between both sides regarding my status as mother researcher, I tried to maintain as much as possible my sensitivity to the autonomy and confidentiality of the child both as an empowered research participant and a capable language learner
Summary
In early September 2013, I moved from South Korea (Korea hereafter) to England to take the one-year Master program in English Language Teaching. I explained to her about the research objectives and overall process in words she could understand and obtained her approval for participation She was very excited that I would make a ‘big book’ on her, where she could see her name ‘100번 {a hundred times}’. Deciding what books to read Stories and books for very young children are normally selected by adults (Jones & Buttrey, 1970). Even though the big furry tiger from The Tiger Who Came to Tea initially had not been well accepted to Jihu but the settings and events, in which the tiger is invited to tea with a similar-aged girl Sophie and her mother at home, bore enough resemblance and familiarity to Jihu’s real world to enable her to empathize with the character. Apart from the features described far, author factor cannot be overlooked because Jihu becomes strongly motivated to read books of her favorite storybook authors such as Eric Carle, Julia Donaldson, Jill Murphy and Oliver Jeffers
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