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

다국어 초록 (Multilingual 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.