The Promise of Bilingual Drama-based Instruction for Young Bilingual Children with Disabilities: A Case Study

• In Event: Instructional Practices for Multilingual Learners with Disabilities

Abstract

Objective
This case study examines the implementation of multilingual, drama-based instruction (DBI) in early literacy with one bilingual preschooler with disabilities. DBI is a playful, imaginative approach to shared book reading that supports literacy and language development in typically-developing children (Authors; Lee et al., 2020; Mages, 2018). DBI provides opportunities to participate and show knowledge through movement, gesture, and facial expression, which also benefits students with disabilities and emergent bilingual students (Cawthon et al., 2011). To date, however, no one has explored the affordances of bilingual DBI for bilingual development of students with disabilities. Given the pervasive lack of multilingual opportunities for young learners with disabilities (Cioè-Peña, 2020; Kangas, 2017), this is an area ripe with possibility.
Theoretical Framework
Theories of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) and translanguaging (García & Li Wei, 2014) inform our view that bilingual learners with disabilities bring unique strengths and needs, and they have an integrated communicative repertoire from which they draw to communicate. This perspective also opens up possibilities for considering repertoire elements beyond verbal language, including gesture, gaze, and facial expression (Rymes, 2014), which coheres well with embodied theories of language comprehension (Glenberg & Gallese, 2012).
Methods
This mixed-methods case study (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2018) explores the effects of a bilingual DBI intervention for Sofía, a four-year-old emergent bilingual student with a developmental delay in cognition and communication. We examined: (RQ1) Sofía’s qualitative experience participating in multilingual DBI; and (RQ2) whether and how Sofía’s engagement, participation, and language use were impacted by Spanish-language DBI lessons.
Data sources and analysis. This study was an alternating treatment single case design (Ledford et al., 2019), with four phases of DBI lessons: English (3), Spanish (3), English (2), Spanish (2). Each lesson was video recorded and coded for Sofía’s engagement and participation (e.g., gesture, body movement verbalization). Sofía’s language in each lesson was also transcribed and analyzed for linguistic complexity.
To answer RQ1, we used multimodal interaction analysis (Norris, 2011). To answer RQ2, each engagement behavior and language outcome was plotted at each time point for visual analysis (Cooper et al., 2007; Kazdin, 2011).
Results
We found that Sofía was initially hesitant to participate in Spanish DBI, but that once she was included in decision-making around using Spanish, ultimately had a positive experience (RQ1). We also found that Sofía’s overall level of participation did not change depending on lesson language. However, her verbalizations followed the language of the lesson, so that she used more Spanish and translanguaging during Spanish-language lessons. Additionally, her communication in Spanish was more significantly more complex than her communication in English (mean length of turn: 2.56 words vs. 1.71 words) and her translingual talk was most complex of all (MLT = 5.82 words; p < .001).
Scientific or scholarly significance
Bilingual DBI may give bilingual students—including those with language disabilities—permission to use their full communicative repertoire, thus increasing the quality of their verbal participation. Bilingual DBI shows promise for providing inclusive, multilingual early literacy experiences and should be explored on a larger scale. [500 words]
References
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Authors

• Katie Bernstein, Arizona State University

• Theresa Moen, Arizona State University

• Lauren van Huisstede, Arizona State University

• Melissa Pierce-Rivera, Midwestern University