The Effects of Shared Singing Picture Book Instruction on Chinese Immersion Kindergarteners’Spoken Vocabulary Recall and Retention

The present study investigates the effects of shared singing of a picture book on the Chinese vocabulary recall and retention of young bilingual learners in Chinese immersion programs using an experimental study design.One hundred and six immersion kindergarteners from three different school districts in the U.S.Midwest were assigned to the experimental group(n=53)and the control group(n=53)at the class level.The experimental group listened to a song-based storybook(also known as a story song)and shared in singing it,while the control group heard the same story,read aloud and shared in reading it.The pre-test was administered to determine the participants’vocabulary level before the study.Immediate and delayed post-tests were used to assess their immediate recall and delayed retention of vocabulary targeted in the shared reading/singing.Independent t-test and one-way ANOVA analysis were employed to examine differences between the two groups in vocabulary recall and retention.The results showed that the experimental group achieved greater improvement in their vocabulary than the control group.This finding suggests that shared singing can be a useful pedagogical tool for spoken vocabulary acquisition and retention in picture books.

Counter-Balancing between CBI and FFI from the Perspective of theEarly Immersion Teaching of Mandarin Chinese in the USA

Language learning and subject matter or content learning have long been deemed to be totally separate and unrelated. It was not until the early 1980 s that coordinating the learning of language and subject matter or content started to receive continuous attention in the field of second language research. In the field of instructed Second Language Acquisition, content-based instruction(CBI) has received much attention in that it integrates both cognitive development and language development. Immersion education refers to additive bilingual programs designed for majority-language speakers in which at least half of their subject-matter instruction is in a language that they are learning as a second or foreign language. Immersion education has been very successful and widely adopted on the globe because immersion students who study subject matter through their second language attain the same levels of academic achievement and first language development as non-immersion students, and they attain significantly higher levels of second language proficiency than do non-immersion students studying the second language as a regular subject for one lesson per day. However, immersion students' second language development, especially their second language accuracy, is not so satisfying as that they have achieved academically. Consequently, form-focused instruction(FFI) is called for to enhance language teaching while content teaching.The present study focuses on how language is processed through content, drawing examples from early immersion teaching of Mandarin Chinese in the USA, so as to provide ideas on effective instructional strategies while teaching Mandarin Chinese in early immersion classrooms in the USA.

Teaching and Learning Chinese through Immersion:A Case Study from the North American Context

With the promise of achieving bilingualism,biliteracy,and cultural pluralism,Chinese immersion programs for students from kindergarten to 12th grade(K-12)in North America,especially the US,have been proliferating in the past two decades.Research on this rapidly growing population of non-native Chinese learners is also growing.This research synthesis focuses on 35 selected studies published in recent years on Chinese immersion in both Chinese and English language journals and books.The review found that researchers are exploring a wide range of issues with respect to language and literacy development in Chinese immersion programs,including academic achievement in English,language and literacy acquisition in Chinese,instructional strategies and classroom interaction,as well as learners’language use and its sociolinguistic variations.These studies reflect a growing interest in and demand for learning more about the lesser-researched Chinese foreign language(CFL)learner population,and this review concludes with suggestions for future research on Chinese immersion based on its curricular features as well as specific considerations for conducting research with young,emergent bilingual and biliterate learners.