Influences of Teachers' Book Plot Narration and Questioning Styles on Social-Emotional Learning in Rural China

• In Event: Understanding the Dynamics of Low-Resource Early Childhood Education Settings in Rural China

Abstract

Objectives and theoretical framework

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is shown to be related to children’s academic success and social skills. Other studies have further identified adult-child interactions as an important influencing factor to SEL; in particular, the process of storytelling, composing of plot narration and questioning, has been found to be a suitable context for adults to initiate social-emotional talks with children. However, most of the research have been conducted in Western contexts and nuclear families, failing to account for rural China’s distinct cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Existing studies on the effectiveness of rural China’s early childhood education have in turn been assessing holistic programs’ impacts on children’s overall development, rather than specifically focusing on SEL, let alone on storytelling as an intervention. With dataset from rural China, we examine (1) during story time, whether teachers’ plot narrations and questions that involve emotion-related topics predict children’s SEL outcome; and 2) whether teachers’ employment of questions that encourage discussions (open-ended) predict children SEL outcome.

Methods

Data from One Village, One Preschool (OVOP) program is used for this study. The data we used was from the preschools in Xichou County, Yunnan Province in China, and 778 students were included in this study. The students age range between 3 to 6 years and the mean age is 47.74. Among the students, 48.4% are girls (n=377). 80 preschool classes and 84 ‘Language Activity’ videos in total were collected throughout the program. We designed a coding scheme that consists of two parts: 1) emotion-related topics and 2) question types. The emotion related topics was divided into three items: mental state/emotion talk, mental causality, and mention of children’s experience. East Asia-Pacific Early Child Development Scales (EAP-ECDS) was used in the data collection, with Chinese translated version. The scales are used to understand the early childhood development context in a given population. EAC-ECDS is developed for 3-5-year olds in the East Asia and Pacific region, including 33 items across 7 different domains: cognitive, social emotional, motor, languages and emergent literacy, health hygiene and safety, cultural knowledge and participation and approaches to learning. In particular, the social emotional development domain was selected in this study to understand students’ SEL development, with six items and eighteen questions in total. We used children’s scores of EAP-ECDS as the dependent variables in this study.

Results

We found a marginally significant negative correlation between emotion-related talk (mention of mental states) and children’s SEL outcomes, but marginally significant positive correlation between open-ended questions and children’s SEL outcomes. The total number of questions and the number of close-ended questions from teachers failed to exhibit any association with children’s SEL scores from the EAP-ECD test. We believe the unexpected outcomes are caused by some limitations and many confounding variables of the current study, including teachers’ professional training, quality of picture books, and mixed-age classroom structures, which can be studied comprehensively in future research.

Authors

• Jue Wang

• Jiayun Guo

• Stephanie Huang