Children's Imaginative Responses While Watching a Bilingual Program

Many teachers and parents seem to have a common worry that even educational TV programs might have a negative effect on children's imagination This study begins with and inquiry what kinds of (non)verbal responses do young English language learners (ELLs) produce while they are watching bilingual TV education programs? For this, two 1st grade Korean children, who are in novice stages in English proficiency, were selected, 10 episodes of the Korean-English version of "Dora the Explorer" were selected The two children were shown the episodes (25minutes per episode) for a period of three weeks (3 to 4 episodes a week) in a way that they could respond to the episodes freely in front of the TV monitor, while they were watching them For data analysis, grounded theory, a methodology derived from symbolic interactionism, was used Charmaz' (1983) synthesis, a grounded theory mode, was revised for this research Results show that the children revealed multi-tasking as a core category, and, under the core category, some sub-categories emerged stepping-in, self-learning, meta-cognizing, and stepping-out Besides the categories, they also proved that they could control their roles, their positions, their distances, and their directions while they were watching and responding From the results, it is arguable that, in contrast to teachers' and parents' fear, the TV program can actually stimulated children' imaginations English teachers should consider how to encourage ELLs to use their imagination when they watch bilingual movie clips