Bilingual Picture Book for Refugee Children the Subject of Education Professor’s Research
For newly arrived refugees, the transition to American society can be difficult, not only in terms of language disparities, but also in terms of cultural and social integration. Educators often struggle with finding inclusive and effective strategies to help ease this transition for refugee children and their families.
“When I found the Saving Stories project, I was so excited,” said Dr. Xia Chao, assistant professor of second language acquisition and teaching in the School of Education. “The project is stimulating and interactive, which is the real dynamic that I have been looking for as a mechanism to bridge refugee families, local communities and our public schools.”
The Saving Stories project is a picture book series created by Renee Christman, an elementary English as a second language (ESL) teacher in the Baldwin-Whitehall School District, and Paula Kelly, a librarian at the Whitehall Public Library, a community with a high refugee population from countries like Nepal, Sudan and Bhutan.
The project is a community-wide collaborative effort to collect, record and share native stories, poems and songs from the refugee population. Both English and native languages appear in the books to help students and families learn English as a second language, while preserving their first language.
“Research indicates that if children are strong in their first language, that will facilitate or scaffold their second language learning,” explained Chao.
Chao received a $10,000 faculty development fund award to complete a two-year ethnographic study about how the project influences newly arrived refugee-family literacy, an experience she believes will be very inclusive and help to integrate refugee families into American society.
Ethnography is a research approach used to explore culture and language within a particular population. Chao’s primary research will involve interviews and observations conducted with refugee families in their homes to observe how the Saving Stories books influence their home literacy activities.
“In education, we are always looking for an ecological community for child development,” said Chao, “In this case, we are focusing on our refugee children’s development and how they can come out of their ethnic community to join our local community.”