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" The Effects of Early Childhood English Language Education Program on Very Young Learners’ Vocabulary Knowledge and Communicative Skills "
Güngör, Burcu
Önder, Alev
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1111754
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TLpq2499386864
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| Main Entry
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Güngör, Burcu
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Önder, Alev
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| Title & Author
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The Effects of Early Childhood English Language Education Program on Very Young Learners’ Vocabulary Knowledge and Communicative Skills\ Güngör, BurcuÖnder, Alev
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| College
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Marmara Universitesi (Turkey)
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| Date
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2020
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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360
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| Abstract
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The better quality English education programs integrating both Early Childhood Education and English Language Education disciplines and involving age-appropriate methodologies, materials and assessment are developed, the more likely young children are to obtain successful and long-lasting learning outcomes in target language. From this point of view, an English education program is developed in this thesis for very young learners considering their distinctive characteristics and diverse language learning needs. In order to examine the effectiveness of this program, two assessment instruments whose formats and procedures are in alignment with the aims of pre-primary foreign language education are designed, piloted and administered to very young learners as a part of empirical study. One of them is an English Picture Vocabulary Test (EPVT) for measuring children's receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge and the other one is Performance-based Assessment (PA) for assessing their communicative skills. These tools are pre-piloted with 20 children of the target age group and final piloted with 251 children from different private pre-primary schools. The internal consistency (Kuder-Richardson Formula 20) are found to be .89, .91, .98 respectively for both EPVT (Receptive), EPVT (Productive) and PA. The selection of upper and lower groups for the validation test items as a technique is used to analyze the discrimination power of PA and point-biserial correlation is used for the item difficulty and discrimination indices of EPVT. The findings indicate that EPVT and PA having ideal difficulty in terms of discrimination potential can serve as a valid and reliable assessment tool for assessing receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge and basic communicative skills of very young EFL learners respectively. In the second part of the study, the newly designed 'Early Childhood English Language Education Program' is piloted on a convenience sample of the target age group from a private pre-primary school to ensure the suitability of content, instructional materials, methods, approaches, principles and assessment tools with VYLs. After some corrections and improvements, the actual intervention is carried out at one of the public pre-primary schools in Beşiktaş/İstanbul. The study group consists of a total of 36 children, aged between 5 and 6 years who are randomly selected from 68 children in this pre-primary school. In this experimental research, the pretest, posttest and delayed posttest measurements are used. There are 18 children in both experimental group (M = 5 years and 11 months) and control group (M = 5 years and 10 months). The English learning hours that last for 40-45 minutes take place three times a week over 16 weeks. There are six common basic themes including 48 target vocabulary and certain structures with which children are familiar in their mainstream education. Whereas these themes are taught using traditional methods including repetition of decontextualized sentences, memorization of target vocabulary and teacher-led activities with flashcards and songs, same themes are taught to experimental group with communicative and interactive approaches including age-appropriate activities (e.g., thinking skill activities, art and craft activities, stories, drama activities, games, songs, parental involvement) in the scope of the program. EPVT and PA are used to measure VYLs' receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge and communicative skills respectively. The findings of this study reveal that treatment group shows rapid gains in English word comprehension, production and communication skills. The children's listening and speaking skills in this group are developed in the target language as a result of their exposure to contextualized language learning in meaningful and enjoyable ways through play-based activities and interactive materials. The 'age' and 'gender' are not considered a significant factor in their L2 learning. The results of delayed posttest also demonstrate that effective TEVYL which has not only short term effects but also long-term; in other words, it provides long-lasting benefits in the L2 learning process. Results show clear evidence that quality L2 education program plays a crucial role in engaging children in active participation, sustaining their interest and developing their linguistic and communicative skills. In addition, children's attitudes, perceptions and interpretations in both groups are elicited to find out about their L2 learning experiences in detail at the end of the intervention through semi-structured interviews. These interviews are analyzed with inductive content analysis which was one of the qualitative research techniques. In this study, 'mixed methods' approach in which qualitative and quantitative research are strategically combined at the data analysis level in order to illuminate each other is used. Considering the results of interview with very young learners on the issues such as the practices they are discouraged, the activities they like and dislike and the motivational factors that make the L2 learning easier, it can be concluded that their opinions and views about all aspects of the L2 education can provide invaluable feedback for teachers, researchers and policymakers.
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Children youth
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Critical thinking
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Hands
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Language
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