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Contextualized and decontextualized questions on bilinguals’ heritage language learning and reading engagement

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Abstract

Little is known about the impact of teachers’ questions on child bilingual’s heritage language reading process and outcomes. This study examined the role of adults’ questions in English-Mandarin bilingual preschoolers’ Mandarin word learning, story comprehension, and reading engagement. Ninety-nine 4- to 5-year-old preschoolers in Singapore were assigned to one of the three reading conditions: (a) reading with contextualized questions (e.g., labelling), (b) reading with decontextualized questions (e.g., inference), and (c) reading without questions. The experimenters read three storybooks to the children three times over 2 weeks. Children’s general Mandarin proficiency was tested before the intervention, and their target words knowledge and story comprehension were tested before and after the intervention. Children’s reading engagement in each reading was assessed with a modified Child Behavior Rating Scale. The results demonstrate that not all aspects of Mandarin performance and reading engagement have benefitted from the experimenter’s questions. Contextualized questions were found to significantly enhance children’s word meaning explanation and story retelling. Contextualized and decontextualized questions lead to higher increase in social-cognitive engagement but resulted in faster decrease in behavioral and affective engagement over repetitive readings. Furthermore, children’s initial Mandarin proficiency influences their reading process and outcomes. Generally, the better their Mandarin vocabulary knowledge was, the more they could enjoy and benefit from the reading, whether they were asked questions or not.

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Change history

  • 09 December 2022

    In the original version of the article the ORCID of the second author was not included and a typo was not corrected in article title.

Notes

  1. Other terms that are synonymous with decontextualized and contextualized questions include “non-immediate and immediate questions” (De Temple & Snow, 1996), “inferential and literal” (Zucker et al., 2010), and “higher and lower cognitive questions” (Sun, Toh, et al., 2020a, 2020b).

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Miss Ivy Chua and Miss Yue Man Gan for their help in manuscript proofreading and literature preparation. The author would also like to express her gratitude to Prof. Emilio Ferrer, Dr. Adam Charles Roberts, and Dr. Shaun Goh for their suggestions on data analysis.

Funding

This study was funded by Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) under the Education Research Funding Programme (OER 17/17 SH) and administered by National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Singapore MOE and NIE.

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Appendices

Appendices

Appendix A

See Table 7.

Table 7 The comparisons of children’s general Mandarin proficiency, SES, reading habits, and short-term memory in the three reading conditions

Appendix B

See Table 8.

Table 8 Examples of screening tests used

Appendix C

See Table 9.

Table 9 The target words of the three stories

Appendix D

See Table 10.

Table 10 Examples of tests assessing knowledge of the target word “melt”, including pictures shown to participants to elicit the word

Appendix E

See Table 11.

Table 11 Example of Story Retelling scene shown to participants with prompts

Appendix F

See Tables 12, 13, 14 and 15.

Table 12 Reading condition and the covariates in predicting children’s Mandarin productive vocabulary
Table 13 Reading condition and the covariates in predicting children’s Mandarin receptive vocabulary
Table 14 Reading condition and the covariates in predicting children’s Mandarin meaning transfer
Table 15 Reading condition and the covariates in predicting children’s Mandarin story retelling

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Sun, H., Batra, R. Contextualized and decontextualized questions on bilinguals’ heritage language learning and reading engagement. Read Writ 37, 973–1009 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10332-z

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