A Case Study on the Effectiveness of Repeated Reading Strategies for English Picture Books in Small-Class Library Corners on Young Children's Core Vocabulary Acquisition

Abstrak

Recent years have seen growing attention to early childhood English enlightenment,for example, the annual enrollment growth rate of bilingual kindergartens nationwide reached 15%, and the proportion of parents signing up 3–4-year-olds for English enlightenment courses has nearly tripled compared to five years ago. Picture books—owing to their dual strengths of interactivity and language input, plus the Ministry of Education’s Guidelines for the Learning and Development of Children Aged 3–6 (2012) explicitly noting that “high-quality picture book reading boosts children’s language perception and vocabulary accumulation”—have become core tools in preschool English teaching. Yet empirical research on repeated reading strategies of English picture books for small-class children remains scarce, especially localized studies in specific kindergarten contexts. Thus, with approval from the principal of Yudong No.4 Primary School Affiliated Kindergarten (Banan District, Chongqing), this study, guided by Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Piaget’s Schema Theory, and Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, conducted an 8-week book corner experiment on 12 3–4-year-olds (experimental group: repeated reading of high-vocabulary-recurrence books; control group: low-recurrence books). Results showed the experimental group’s post-test accuracy (83.7%) was significantly higher than the control’s (59.2%). So repeated reading effectively enhances small-class children’s vocabulary mastery. Not only does this study provide practical plans for English picture book reading in the specific “small-class book corner” scenario , but it also verifies the role of “repeated reading strategy” in promoting young children’s core vocabulary acquisition. Furthermore, it offers replicable empirical references for similar kindergartens to conduct English picture book teaching, filling the gap in localized research on repeated reading of English picture books for small-class children.