A case study

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate the development of a five-year-old child’s language and literacy development in English and Chinese within a tutoring context where the primary materials were wordless picture books. In this study, ten wordless picture books were used during the three weekly tutoring sessions for ten consecutive weeks. Story telling in English and Chinese was the primary activity in each session. Extended activities included labeling pictures, reading biliterate text, sentence making and invented spelling. Assessments were done to examine the child’s development in alphabet and character recognition, directionality, oral and reading vocabulary in English and Chinese. Analyses of data indicated that wordless picture books were appropriate and beneficial materials to use with this child in that they enabled her to grasp the concept of story structure, develop comprehension, use creative thinking, increase vocabulary, communicate in a higher language level, and learn spelling rules of the English language.