| 其他摘要 | Environmental print is defined as surrounding non-continuous print that is encountered in a particular context and fulfils real-life functions, such as road signs, labels, packaging boxes. Compared with the continuous prints in books and newspapers, environmental print has rich contextual cues, such as bright colors, prominent fonts and pictures along side. Environmental print widely appears in children's fife, providing them with the earliest print experience. Through the interaction with environmental print, children begin to understand the meaning and function of prints and develop emergent literacy skills.
Previous studies found that children are naturally attracted to contextual cues in environmental prints. Using environmental prints as learning materials can better promote the development of emergent literacy skills and improve children's visual-orthographic awareness than standard words without contextual cues. However, most of these studies were carried out in native Engfish-speaking children. Chinese visual-orthographic rules are very different from that of English. By now, there is no clear empirical evidence on whether environmental print learning can promote the emergent literacy skills in Chinese children. In addition, most of the previous studies only examined the children at a certain age, and the effects of different approaches of environment print learning were inconsistent.
Therefore, the current study takes Chinese preschool children as the research participants. On the basis of previous studies, this study not only investigates whether same effects of learning environmental print on Engfish children would be applied on Chinese children, but also further explores the effects of different environmental print learning approaches in children of different ages. Eight groups of environmental prints familiar to children were selected as learning materials. Children were divided into three age groups: 4 years old, 5 years old and 6 years old. Children in each age group were randomly divided into four experimental groups and one control group according to different learning approaches. The four experimental groups are: the learning group that uses environmental prints containing complete contextual cues as learning materials and is taught by teachers; the learning group that uses environmental prints without contextual cues as learning materials and is taught by teachers; the learning group that uses the environmental prints containing complete contextual cues as the learning materials, with children naturally exposed to the environmental prints; and the learning group in which children are naturally exposed to the non-contextual cued environmental print as learning materials. Before and after training, children were tested for environmental print recognition and visual-orthographic awareness to investigate the effect of training.
Consistent with the previous research results, the results showed that Chinese children who have been taught environmental prints have significantly improved in environmental print recognition and visual-orthographic awareness tests, and their performance was better than that of the other experimental groups. Compared with the standard print, the environmental print has rich contextual cues, which is vivid and can attract children's attention, and has a significant learning effect on children who are developing emergent literacy skills.
From the total score of the visual-orthographic awareness test, the best effect of environmental learning came from the groups that are taught explicitly by teachers. For 4-year-old children, the effect of natural exposure of environmental prints with complete contextual cues was not significant. For 5-year-old and 6-year-old children effect of natural exposure of environmental prints with complete contextual cues significant. These results showed that among the younger 4-year-old children teachers' teaching is a better learning approach, while in the older 5-year-old and 6-year-old children, learning under natural exposure can also be an effective approach. Theses results indicated that children can benefit from environmental print learning, but children's age should be considered in choosing learning approach.
The present study also found that the impacts of environmental print teaching were different on the different aspects of visual-orthographic awareness. After training, the graphic awareness of Chinese characters in 4-year-old children has been significantly improved, the sensitivity of inverted Chinese characters in 4-year-old, 5-year-old and 6-year-old children has been significantly improved, while the sensitivity of character position in 4-year-old and 5-year-old children showed a significant learning effect. These results showed that using environmental prints in teaching at different stages have different effects on the different aspects of visual-orthographic awareness.
The results of the current study provide important empirical data for the study of environmental print learning on emergent literacy skills, and also have practical significance for using environmental prints to learn in kindergarten. |
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