Abstract
This study used a quasi-experimental design to determine the effects of teachers’ story read-aloud on EFL elementary school students’ word learning outcomes. It specifically examined whether the word learning was enhanced by teachers’ repeated story read-aloud and word-meaning explanations and further determined whether the learning outcomes were related to children’s English proficiency. Two native English-speaking teachers read a story to their fourth-grade classes four times. The results showed that increasing frequency of story read-aloud yielded greater word-learning gains across time. The EFL children, on average, learned approximately half of the target words by the third read-aloud. While both high- and low-proficiency groups showed significant vocabulary gains with the frequency of teachers’ read-aloud, the high-proficiency children consistently outperformed their low-proficiency peers, especially on the L1 meaning-matching vocabulary test. The overall findings were quite encouraging and showed empirical evidence that teachers’ repeated story read-aloud can be an effective way to facilitate elementary school children’s word learning in a context where English is a foreign language.
Highlights
Listening to stories is a common and enjoyable activity inside and outside a language classroom (Holdaway, 1982; Wells, 1986)
The researchers suggested that reading storybooks aloud to young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners can help to promote a variety of English skills related to oral and literacy development and should be integrated into the EFL elementary school curriculum
English proficiency scores represented the sum of raw scores on the listening and reading-writing subtests, and the target word scores comprised the sum of scores from the picture identification and L1 meaning-matching tests
Summary
Listening to stories is a common and enjoyable activity inside and outside a language classroom (Holdaway, 1982; Wells, 1986). Paralinguistic, discourse, and cultural information for children to develop their language skills in a meaningful context. Teachers reading stories to students in a foreign language in the elementary school is considered to benefit language learners who often have relatively limited exposure to a rich spoken environment in the target foreign language (Kirsch, 2012). It was found that the storybooks provide richer language input than the textbooks in terms of more diverse vocabulary, sentence patterns, and culture information within more authentic and meaningful contexts. The researchers suggested that reading storybooks aloud to young EFL learners can help to promote a variety of English skills related to oral and literacy development and should be integrated into the EFL elementary school curriculum
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