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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.797-820
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 06 Jun 2022 Revised 14 Aug 2022 Accepted 31 Aug 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202208.797

Children’s Picture Books as a Source of L2 Literacy Curriculum: A Preliminary Corpus-based Study

Eun-Young Choi ; Younghee Cheri Lee
(co-first author) Graduate Student, Dept. of English Education, Chung-Ang Univ., Tel: 02-820-5391 cey1981@cau.ac.kr
(co-first author/ corresponding author) Teaching Professor, Dasan University College, Ajou Univ., Tel: 031-219-3053 cheriberry@ajou.ac.kr


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

It has been a widely accepted claim that reading a children’s picture book lays a foundation for young learners’ literacy development. Despite meaningful efforts to promote picture-book programs at public schools in the domestic education context, a feasible, tailored picture-book literacy program is still mostly confined to private education sectors, not public English classroom settings. By employing a corpus-based approach to lexical difficulty, thus, this study purports to delve into whether children’s picture books in native L1 English can be utilized as a primary source of an L2 literacy curriculum accessible in Korean public class settings. To this end, using the Project Gutenberg archive, we built a corpus of children’s picture books entitled the COCH, which encompasses 600 stories with 452,219 tokens. Then, we computed the token coverage rate of each picture book using two-tiered analyses. One was to employ VP-Kids levels 1 to 10 (Roessingh and Cobb 2008) as baseword level lists, and the other was to adopt the KEBWL lists (Shin 2015) compiled based on the national English curriculum of Korea. The results evidenced that sixty children’s picture books reached the threshold level of token coverage when the VP-Kids lists were applied. When the KEBWL lists were based, though, it was found that only ten books could survive to fit into the literacy curriculum for elementary schoolers and twenty-nine picture books for secondary schools in the Korean teaching context. During analyses, this study was attentive to how children’s picture books that exceed the minimum threshold level of token coverage could have been adjusted and how off-list words could have been revalued to take in more picture books in the shortlist of the L2 picture-book-based literacy curriculum. Implications and future research directions concerning a children’s picture book as a source of L2 linguistic and cultural literacy will be discussed.

Keywords:

picture book, children’s book, young learner, L2, reading, token coverage, vocabulary profile, literacy curriculum, L2 literacy, cultural literacy, BNC/COCA, VP-Kids, corpus

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