Lani’s reading continued

Lani and I continued to read through How Big Is Big? today, but I found a few obstacles. I have a theory that studying immediately after watching TV is resulting in a lack of attention span. Furthermore, because of the “floor culture” of Korea where time spent in the home is typically on the ground, Lani tends to roll around a lot. To improve her reading focus, I will have to limit her TV watching (which is all in English) before we read together, and I might consider investing in a small chair and desk to force her to sit up in front of the book.

We continued the reading with the following words/lexeme:

1. small
2. smaller
3. smallest

I would have liked to included another word, but I had to cut our reading session short because my patience was wearing thin because her focus (or lack of it) was grating me the wrong way, and I think it’s better to keep study fun for her at this point.

Here is an Excel file of the vocabulary words encountered in the book as listed above: How Big Is Big? Vocabulary List

Lani, current age: 4 years and 4 months

Book:

Lani’s first reading

Lani is now nearly 4 years and 4 months old. Because it seems unlikely that we’ll be able to move back to the States in time for Lani to enter kindergarten, it looks like I’ll have to be the one to teach her to read.

Although her preschool here in South Korea is teaching her to read Korean, their English curriculum pretty much ends at uppercase letters (ignoring lowercase letters completely, despite being more prevalent in language, as a quick survey of this post will attest), and their lessons are just songs and vocabulary divorced from context.*

We’re started with a Puffin Easy-To-Read graded reader (Level 1). I’ve selected How Big Is Big? as our first book to get through. Although applied linguistics is my field, I have not done any research into first language acquisition in young learners, although I have helped my wife a bit with her graduation thesis on the acquisition of numeric classifiers in trilingual children.

I went through a few resources on skills for teaching young children to read, and applied it to our first reading practice session rather successfully. Lani’s first reading words were:

1. big
2. bigger
3. biggest
4. rabbits (her choice)

The book consists of 166 words (and by ‘words’ I mean it in the orthographic sense and not ‘lexical units’ — for example, I considered “Great” and “Dane” to be individual words instead of the single lexical unit “Great Dane”), with 50 unique words, and 41 lexemes. I should note that I left “what’s” as a single word in compound form instead of breaking it into “what” + “‘s”. I also left ‘is’ and ‘are’ as unique lexemes because of the lack of shared letters, resulting in a higher difficulty in processing than, say, “dog” versus “dogs”.

With that said, Lani studied 8% of the unique words in the book, and almost 5% of the lexemes in our first sitting. It took us about 40 minutes to read through it several times with different approaches varying in degrees of input and involvement.

Here is an Excel file of the vocabulary words encountered in the book as listed above: How Big Is Big? Vocabulary List

Lani, current age: 4 years and 4 months

*While I thought Obama’s 2011 state of the union address was relatively good, I strongly disagree with his misinformation on the superiority of the Korean education system, as does my wife who has been through the system first hand.

Book:

A hint of the ma’s

Reina has started hinting at her second vowel — M. This follows about a week behind her B sounds, but they occur far less frequently.

Besides language, Reina has become quite adept at rolling, both from back to stomach as well as stomach to back. She tries to crawl forward but ends up inching backward instead, but she can swivel herself around with her hands quite well on her stomach. She is able to hold a bottle up with her hands, and reaches for just about anything with quite good aim.

She’s still quite a smiley baby, a lot more bubbly than Lani who was a bit of a serious, straight-faced baby.

Reina, current age: 5 months

Ba Ba’s

Reina is relatively competent with forming her ‘B’ sounds now, and is very fond of starting with a long ‘A’ sound, adding a ‘bu’ and then finishing with a ‘ba’, which is interesting because it is actually a word with meaning in Korean – ‘Abuba’ is used with babies to mean held in a sling on the back in traditional fashion. She tends to say it when she is crying, and it seems like she is asking to be held on mommy’s back, but I think it’s just a coincidence, or she’s imitating what my wife says when Reina is crying.

Reina, current age: 5 months

Babbling begins

Reina is now 5 months old, and the raspberries have begun. For the past month she had been very conscious of my mouth when I spoke to her, and she would shift her focus to her own mouth which I could see by her tongue movement effort. She was aware of the mouth as a noise generator, it would seem.

She can now form a few basic vowel sounds by twisting her tongue while simultaneously making arbitrary noises in innovation of adult speech, and she loves to force air from her mouth through partially closed lips, creating “raspberry noises”.

Reina, current age: 5 months

Semiotic communication

Reina has begun to really start reaching for things she wants, like milk bottles and bright toys. Her facial expressions are focused when she has a desired object in sight, and her cries have started to take on nuances depending on meaning, such as a cry for discomfort, a cry for pain, a cry for fatigue, and a cry for hunger. She seems more desperate for communication when given feedback, especially when she is hungry.