Bilingual Students’ Meaning-Making Strategies When Exploring Wordless Picture Books in Interactive Shared Reading

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Sensemaking: Multiple Perspectives and Multiple Contexts (Table 38)

Abstract

Employing a transactional theory as a guiding lens, this study explores second-grade Korean-English bilingual students’ dialogical patterns of interaction during interactive shared book reading, where different genres (i.e., realistic, fantasy, historical, & science fictions, folktale, and narrative nonfiction) of wordless picturebooks were provided. Using an open and a priori coding, eight codes are developed to identify the students’ meaning-making strategies when analyzing illustrations and building storylines of the wordless picturebooks. The findings present that the bilingual students engaged in deeper interaction with the pictorial images and utilized diverse but different meaning-making strategies according to the genres of wordless picturebooks. The study suggests that third spaces like heritage language schools can be desirable places to develop such essential skills.

Author

• Chaehyun Lee, Southeastern Oklahoma State University