The Development of Bilingual Children’s Narrative Skills: A Report of the “Looking Glass Neighborhood” Program

Abstract

AbstractThis paper evaluates Look Glass Neighborhood (LGN), an educational after-school program being experimented in San Diego, California. Following the theories of Vygotskian psychology and the “Fifth-Dimension” education model, LGN aims at improving bilingual children’s literacy via interactive games and letter writing activities. Based on previous studies on first language acquisition over past decades, the paper first discusses the inadequacy of research on child narrative development, especially in terms of the lack of attention to bilingual children and the insufficient discussion on applying first language acquisition theories to early literacy education. Then, it demonstrates the unique designs of the “Looking Glass Neighborhood” program by a qualitative analysis of ethnographic data from two elementary school bilingual participants in the program, explicating the program’s focuses on the interactions between oral performance and content-focused co-writing activities. Finally, the paper explores the possibility to embed some design elements of LGN such as content-based, co-writing activities and indirect oral corrective feedback into China’s current kindergarten and elementary EFL curriculums.