English Acquisition through Storytelling: A Corpus-Based Analysis of and Comparison between School Texts and Storybooks
The present study was an attempt to investigate the potential advantage of using picture books to help young childrens English acquisition by examining the corpora in the 65 storybooks read to a group of EFL children in Wang & Lee (2007). Our analysis included five categories: (a) total number of word tokens, (b) total number of headwords, (c) parts of speech, (d) theme related word usage, and (e) frequency of word recurrence in the stories. The results of this corpus analysis were compared with the vocabulary provided by three representative textbook series used in the Taipei area. The results show that children listening to the 65 books obtained vocabulary input that was far larger than that provided by any textbook series used in public schools, with more overall words and more different headwords. More content words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs) recycled three or more times within the 65 books than in the text series designed for the six elementary years. Also, the number of words that appeared in the books with a common theme was about two thirds of the vocabulary requirement set by the Ministry of Education. These results explain Wang & Lees finding that EFL children who hear stories become independent readers after only four years, while most students cannot reach this level after six years of instruction.
Ming-yi Hsieh Fei-yu Wang Sy-ying Lee
Department of Applied Foreign Languages National Taiwan University English Language Center Ming Chuan University Department of Foreign Languages and Applied Linguistics National Taipei University of Science and Te
国际会议
2009 International Conference on Applied Linguistics & Language Teaching(2009应用语言学暨语言教学国际研讨会)
台湾
英文
312-322
2009-04-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）