Chapter One Introduction
1.1 General Introduction of the Study
This thesis discusses the principles that have guiding significance for designing quality chil-English books for Chinese readers from the perspective of SLA theories. It aims at explor-ing a fea writers and publishers to design successful books foryoung readers, conveying interesting stories and ways of enhancing English proficiency.It is widely acknowledged that children's reading skills are important for their success. In ad-dition, reading can be a fun and imaginative activity for them, which opens doors to all kinds ofnew worlds for them. or children in non-English native speaking families, readingin a second language is also a good and necessary means to learn the languageout of school, or to say, to acquire the language, if the word acquisition should be differentiatedfrom learning.In China, English reading materials serve not only as entertainment or visual en-joyment, but as a source of language acquisition. Theoretically acquisition mostly takes place withlistening to foreign talks, interacting orwatching English programs, but in real life, reading has also turned out to be one of the most im-portant ways to acquire a language. The quality of reading materials is closely related to the effi-ciency of children . However in the domestic booming market oflot of the books are so roughly made that they have gone against the nature of language acquisi-tion.
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1.2 Organization of the Thesis
The second chapter reviews some historical and ex-isting views on reading, acquisition and the related theories, e.g., the Input Hypothesis, natural or-der of acquisition, cognitive development theory, etc. The third chapter brings about some neces-sary in terms of content, grammar andform respectively. The fourth chapter discusses some facts on the current market of chilbooks and then some popular book series are studied by using quantitative and qualitative researchmethods, to look into the practical use of the designing principles. The last chapter is the conclu-sion, in which the main points of the thesis will be reviewed, and limitations and directions for fu-ture research will be presented.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 The Acquisition-Learning Distinction
This is one of the most fundamental questions across all SLA studies. Learners are believedto develop language competence via two distinctive ways.The first is called language acquisition, a subconscious and implicit process where the learnera language (Krashen, 1982), usually mother tongue, or a second language in a naturalsetting. The learner is not clearly aware of the grammatical rules of the language he has acquired,The secondin the narrow sense of word, meaning develop language competence, by means of knowinggrammatical rules, memorizing words or phrases or doing exercises. It is a conscious process thatusually takes place in a classroom (Johnson, 2003). The learner is fully aware of the learning pro-cess he is engaged in. Metalanguage is often used in the explicit learning to explain linguistic fea-tures. Thus the difference between acquisition and learning lies in whether the process is subcon-scious or not. The experimented students began with much lower score than the control group but later,with rapid progress, they could almost catch up with the latter ones who went on with a traditionaleducation.other interesting experiment called A Clockwork Orange research (Krashen,2004, p14). A Clockwork Orange is a famous but obscure science fiction by A. Burgess. In thebook mmon to most people. The testees wereonly asked to go through the whole book, while none of them was reminded of paying any special attention to the dialect words. After that, they were given some choice questions on the words.The result came out inspiringly with the accuracy ranging from 50% to 96%, which means thatintentionally. So wecan draw a conclusion that unintentional vocabulary acquisition actually happens when a reader isfocusing on the comprehension of the information in the texts. Heencountering them in context during the process ofInput Hypothesis (see Section 2.3.2).
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2.2 Reading and Acquisition
The target language that a learner is exposed to when the SLA takes place is usually thoughtto be spoken language, such as caretaker talks, family talks or community talks. However, exten-sive reading is also a significant source for learners, especially for Chinese kids most of whomlive in monolingual surroundings.remains a major problem in English acquisition. Their English language skills are mainly taught ina traditional and explicit way in classroom. Therefore reading in English appears to be an com-plementary yet effective way to acquire the language. Extensive reading has been proven to be a significant but often neglected language teachingapproach when we are learning a language (either mother tongue or L2). It is helpful in laying theroot for fluency by improving spelling, writing, grammar and so on (though it cannot make thehighest level of language proficiency on its own) (Krashen, 2011). In this sense extensive readingis one of the simplest but effective methods to educate L2 learners.Many researches have been conducted to support the effectiveness of extensive reading forsecond language development (Chio, 2009). Beniko Manson made a research to probe into the ef-fect of acquisition through reading (Mason & Krashen, 1997). He asked some Japanese studentswho had failed in English tests to keep reading simplified level readings both in school and athome. What they should do were only doing free reading, keeping diaries and recording their feel-ings and experiences. After one semester, the experimental group was found to make impressiveprogress in a Cloze test (see Table 1)
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Chapter Three Designing.....17
3.1 Book Grading .....17
3.2 Age Breakdown........ 17
3.3 The Design of Content ......... 18
3.4 The Design of Grammar .......22
3.4.1 The Necessity of English Grammar Learning Through Reading .......23
3.4.2 Order of Morphemes Acquisition .......23
3.4.3 Order of Syntactic Acquisition..... 24
3.5 The Design of Form .......29
3.6 Summary ......30
Chapter Four Research Methodology ....31
4.1 Facts on the C Books Market31
4.2 Case Study.... 34
4.2.1 A Quantitative Study on Two Series and Data Analysis........ 35
4.2.2 A Qualitative Study on Sammy the Seal and Data Analysis....37
Chapter Four Research Methodology
4.1 Facts on the C Books Market
Perhaps because so many of people learned the love of books as children or because Chineseparents are in great need of qualified early education books, a lot of people aspire to make chil-ooks forchildren is easier than writing an adult book, or that it's easier to get a children's book published.In China, there are 367 million juveniles, which meanshile traditional publication industry is slow-state owned presses and private studios are throwing them-selves in exploiting the market, contributing to an astonishing number of over 45 thousand kinds ayear (Chen, 2013), about half of which is learning aidsreadings. Due to the curiosity about western educational idea and the desire to catch up with theeducational paces of some advanced countries, lots of kids, or their parents, are inclined to chooseim widelyacknowledged for their interesting stories and exquisite pages, but because they have on theirmproving Chinese English competence. Some of the well-soldimported books are Harry Potter, Goosebumps, The Chronicles of Narnia and Dr. Seuss series, etc.
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Conclusion
In addition, with quantitative and qualitative data studies, several principles are brought aboutfor designing in respect of content, grammar and form, like book grading,age breakdown, content deciding, grammar arrangement, keeping cognitive accordance and so on.However, there are still limitations in this thesis. While it mainly focuses on the significance ofinput, due to restricted space it doesand interaction and output. There are reasons to believe that the latter two also have an impact onreadBesides, nowada soft-ware, or even some books are published in form of electronic books which are paper-free and inter-active. Children can directly learn English on personal computers, tablet computers (like iPad) orre-mains for future study.
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