Double Entry Journal 4-week 10-Jungshih

n   Mental Space and Picture Books in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language to Children by Chen Pin

Needless to say, picture books play an important role in early literacy in any languages. With its virtues of having opportunities to cultivate characters such as empathy, sympathy, and cross-cultural diversity. However, there are few pitfalls arisen after going through this paper:

To begin with, there was an experiment conducted, however the purposes of the experiment was confusing because the author aimed to analyze the material by utilizing mental space theory and it seemed to apply this theory to classroom practice (Chen, p111). Though the author divided participants into experiment and control groups, yet the levels of their starting points and ending points have not been told. This might lead to practice effect on the results due to some experienced learners’ outperforming than basic ones. Thus, the validity and credibility might be problematic.

Secondly, dependent and independent variables are not clear. On page 111, this instructional experiment was divided into three phases, and the third phase was to draw a mental-spatial concept diagram by the participants? This is problematic because the age and analytic ability of the participants. Also, no appendixes can be found in this paper.

On the whole, the topic chosen is greatly suitable for TCFL/TCSL due to picture books. Literature indeed provides several functions for children such as aesthetics, life values, and early character-building as well. Children identify and recognize their life experience and map them onto interesting animal characters.  Steven Krashen once stated that language acquisition might be hazardous it learners’ affective filter is too high. Therefore, picture books actually creates a mental space, allowing imagination to be concretized and visualized, and increase the chance of language acquisition taking place. The author attempted to draw correlations among theories, materials as well as classroom practice. Nevertheless, it appeared confounding in the coherence of this paper although the framework is clear but the content needs to be tightened.

Questions:

n   If you were the author, what part of the paper would you modify in order to link the theory to practice?

n   How would you conduct the same experiment to increase its validity and credibility?