Local culture-based picture storybooks for teaching English for young learners

Abstract

This paper reports the theoretical perspectives underlying the development of local culture-based picture storybooks for teaching English for young learners. It is a library research which derives from three main sources, journal articles, reference books, and internet articles. Local culture-based picture storybooks are kinds of printed materials which basically contain stories adapted from local culture stories accompanied with visualization in the forms of pictures telling the characters and the settings to help young learners easily understand the stories. They are developed considering the good criteria of storybooks [1, 2]. The benefits of its development are (1) to improve reading skill of young learners, (2) to build children English literacy through listening to the story read by the teachers and communicating interactively with them through dialogic reading, (3) create a fun learning atmosphere which enhances motivation and participation to take part in understanding and using the language, and (4) to preserve local culture. The books are developed using a combination of model [3, 4] which has 5 main steps namely need analysis, developing product, expert validation, and quality assessment by experts and users (teachers), and main product revision.