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Message Boards: A Springboard to Literacy for Prekindergarten English Language Learners (and Others, Too)
Author(s) -
MARTINEZ GILDA,
LASTER BARBARA P.,
CONTE BETTY
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
tesol journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.468
H-Index - 14
eISSN - 1949-3533
pISSN - 1056-7941
DOI - 10.5054/tj.2010.214882
Subject(s) - literacy , documentation , psychology , mathematics education , qualitative research , variation (astronomy) , pedagogy , computer science , sociology , social science , physics , astrophysics , programming language
Message boards provide an opportunity for students, teachers, and parents to write (or draw) about a story from their lives on a large or small chalkboard. Oral language is then used to describe the written message during a structured circle time. (It is a variation of the traditional show‐and‐tell except that the focus is on the communication of stories through conversations and writing rather than explanations about possessions.) A teacher in a prekindergarten classroom in Florida, in the United States, has been using message boards over the past 10 years. In collaboration with this teacher, researchers decided to examine the effectiveness of message boards on the literacy progress of the English language learners (as well as the few native‐English‐speaking students) in her classroom. Through this qualitative study, this teacher and her students were observed and interviewed, and documentation of the message boards was collected and carefully examined to determine what student achievement, if any, was evident. The results indicate that language and literacy growth was noted through the use of message boards.