Vocabulary instruction during interactive book reading with emergent bilinguals

With increasing linguistic diversity, many children are learning a new language at school while simultaneously maintaining and developing their home language. This places a significant responsibility on schools to support emergent bilinguals’ vocabulary development in the language of instruction. Interactive book reading (IBR) has shown to be an effective method for promoting vocabulary learning, offering opportunities for rich and meaningful interaction. The present study examines how interaction regarding vocabulary unfolds during IBR. Adopting a functional multilingual learning approach, the study leverages L1 as a scaffold to support L2 learning. Over a five-week intervention, 27 participants (M age = 7.5; SD = 0.60), divided into six IBR groups, took part in 30 sessions, amounting to 20 hours, 49 minutes, and 26 seconds of audio recordings. Three IBR approaches were adopted: (1) IBR solely in L2, (2) IBR in L2 with L1 interaction, and (3) IBR in L2 with L1 interaction supplemented with technology-driven L1 explanations. Each week, eight target words were explicitly taught during IBR, resulting in a total of 40 target words. A detailed coding scheme was developed to analyze language use, focusing on the actor (i.e., adult, child), form (e.g., question, cue), and purpose (e.g., referring to images, translating) of language expressions. While final results are forthcoming, this study aims to provide insights in how interaction regarding vocabulary evolves during IBR, how emergent bilinguals respond to functional multilingual learning approaches, and how adult readers who do not speak the children’s L1 navigate functional multilingual vocabulary instruction during IBR. Keywords: intentional vocabulary instruction, interactive book reading, emergent bilingual children