Language Interventions for Rural Chinese Children in Boarding Preschools

Dr Zhang, Xiao   (Principal Investigator (PI))

Professor Yin Shaoqing   (Co-Investigator)

Dr Xie Qianwen   (Co-Investigator)

24

2021-06-01

150000

Language Interventions for Rural Chinese Children in Boarding Preschools

Boarding Preschool, Dialogic Reading, Language, Rural Children, Storytelling

Education: Research on Teaching & LearningPsychology

202010160008

Seed Fund for PI Research – Translational and Applied Research

2020

On-going

China launched its Rural School Merger Program in the late 1990s with the aim to improve education quality through centralization of educational resources (Mo et al., 2012). This initiative continued for more than one decade and focused mainly on merging of primary schools (Mo et al., 2012). In recent years, rural preschools in southwest China have also started merging, resulting in a large group of children being placed in boarding preschools at an early age (3 or 4 years old). According to Sun and Li (2013), these children typically spent five whole days per week in boarding preschools and were allowed to go back home only on weekends. There were around one third of preschools that had a boarding section, and the boarding rate could be up to 80% in some schools (Sun & Li, 2013). Given the established finding that early separation from parents had a profound, negative impact on child development (Dozier, Zeanah, Wallin & Shauffer, 2012; van IJzendoorn et al., 2011), it is important to find solutions to mitigate the possible negative effects of boarding experience on rural Chinese children. There has been limited research on boarding children in early childhood. Most of the relevant research is from studies of institutional care, which many Romanian children received when they were placed in institution from birth to 3 years of age before the fall of the Communist government in 1989. Compared with children who were not institutionalized, children experiencing institutional care had lower levels of attachment security (Smyke et al., 2012), higher level of indiscriminate behaviors such as going off with a stranger (Zeanah, Smyke & Dumitrescu, 2002), and delay in physical (e.g., height, weight) and cognitive development (e.g., general intelligence, verbal ability, reading ability and memory; Johnson et al., 2010 ; Dozier, Zeanah, Wallin & Shauffer, 2012). Over the past years, we conducted a comparative study of rural preschool children who received boarding services and their peers who did not. We found that boarding preschool children performed worse than non-boarders in receptive vocabulary (Xiao & Zhang, 2020a) and assertiveness (Xiao & Zhang, 2020b). Therefore, it is essential to help rural boarding preschool children mitigate the unfavorable impacts. Based on social-cultural theories (Vygotsky, 1962; Bruner, 1983), language development is rooted in social interactions, and response to and talk with children can support their language development. In previous studies, language interventions based on adult-child interactions have shown effectiveness in improving children’s language development. For example, Piasta et al. (2012) found that children who had whole-group shared book reading in classroom performed better in reading and spelling than their peers who did not. Dialogic reading (Whitehurst et al., 1988; DR) has also be found to promote children’s literacy skills (Doyle & Bramwell, 2006), and has been widely used in many language-based programs (Arnold et al., 1994; Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998; Valdez- Menchaca and Whitehurst, 1992; What Works Clearinghouse, 2007). Apart from that, some studies found that DR had additional beneficial effects on children’s social-emotional skills. For example, Doyle and Bramwell (2006) and Fettig et al. (2016) showed that DR could promote children’s prosocial skills through characters and social-emotional content in stories. Studies about teacher-child interactions also found that emotional support from teachers was conductive to children’s social-emotional competence (Mashburn et al., 2008; Wilson, Pianta, & Stuhlman, 2007). Therefore, DR is likely to contribute to both language and social development of children. Notably, previous studies on DR have been conducted in the day preschool settings, and little effort has been made to examine the effect of DR on the development of rural boarding preschools. Our studies in Yunnan boarding preschools showed that the teacher-child relationship of boarding children was worse than that of non-boarding children (Xiao & Zhang, 2020a). Moreover, teachers in the boarding preschools had limited personal interactions with children (Xiao, Chen, Justice, & Zhang, 2020). In the literature, more personal teacher-child interactions predicted higher teacher-child closeness (Rudasill & Rimm-Kaufman, 2009). Hence, interactive DR is likely to affect teacher-child relationships. However, few studies have explored the effect of DR on teacher-child relationships. Therefore, besides language skills and social skills, the present study will also measure teacher-child relationships so as to improve the disadvantaged situation of boarding preschool children and enrich the literature on the effectiveness of DR. Moreover, we are also interested in whether language stimulus from non-human sources such as audio and video stimulus are helpful to rural boarding preschool children. Although a few studies have revealed that media exposure in early childhood is harmful to children’s language and literacy development (Clarke & Kurtz-Costes, 1997; Pagani et al., 2013), many studies have indicated different results. For example, Lavigne et al. (2015) and Montag et al. (2015) found that media use enabled children to acquire new vocabulary. Dore et al. (2020) found that using media was moderately beneficial to children’s language skills. Notably, most studies in this field have focused on TV viewing in home settings. Recently, an intervention study conducted in rural China reported positive effects of bedtime radio storytelling on the socioemotional well-being of primary boarding school children (Growing Home, 2017). Because audio stimulus can be generated and distributed at a very low cost, as compared to one-to-one interactions, the present study will also include an intervention group practicing radio storytelling besides the intervention group of DR.