A Case Study: Emergent Biliteracy in English and Chinese of a 5-Year-Old Chinese Child with Wordless Picture Books

This study was designed to investigate the development of a 5-year-old child's language and literacy development in English and Chinese within a 10-week tutoring context where the primary materials were wordless picture books. Storytelling in English and Chinese were the primary activities in each session. Extended activities included labeling, sentence making, and invented spelling. Data were analyzed to examine the child's development in alphabet and character recognition, directionality, and oral and reading vocabulary in English and Chinese. Results indicated that wordless picture books combined with the extended literacy activities facilitated the child's learning in both the languages. Ran, while volunteering in a kindergarten classroom, met Chaochao (pseudonym), a 5-year-old girl, who had come from China only 4 weeks ago. Ran could see that Chaochao was uncomfortable and unresponsive in the classroom where everyone spoke English. When she talked to Chaochao in Chinese, Chaochao nodded and smiled. After a while, she murmured that she did not understand what the teacher said. Ran offered to teach Chaochao outside of school. Chaochao's parents accepted. Teaching Chaochao provided the opportunity to investigate how her English and Chinese language skills developed concurrently. Specifically, Ran studied the use of wordless picture books to promote emergent biliteracy.