Grace Kearns

Bilingual Book for Children trying to Learn English when coming from a Foreign Speaking Environment.

Global Context - Personal and Cultural Expression

Goal - To create a bilingual book for young children who are transitioning from a foreign speaking environments into English speaking ones, my goal is to create the book in French, Irish and Spanish.

Introduction

I chose this global context because I felt as though it fit the criteria of my research project perfectly. My project talks a lot about personal expression for children as they find it hard to speak up and communicate their thoughts and ideas at times, especially at a young age. Cultural expression is also seen in my project as it talks about the cultural challenges that children face when trying to express themselves in a foreign country such as learning a new language and also cultural challenges of moving to a new country. When view these two together I can say that the global context relates to my project by researching how children with different cultural backgrounds verbally express themselves.

Illustrating My Story

For the project I created a series of 10 images that illustrate my story. My story is about a deer called Oliver. The first thing I knew is that the book had to be gender fluid while also being interesting for my target audience. From there the creation of Oliver the deer formed.

After creating Oliver I decided I needed to create more characters, friends for Oliver so that the story would become interesting. From there I created more characters 2 squirrels, 1 raccoon and 2 rabbits. I thought that these characters would be engaging to the children and add something different to the story. I tried to include an adventure into the story too that would make the child more engaged and use their imagination further. The story depicts an adventure that Oliver and his friends go on, one that is thrilling but dangerous. Oliver and his friends encounter some obstacles on their journey that they must get through. To end the story I wanted to end on a rather happy note but also a complete twist in the story.

Process

When first starting out to create this project I began researching extensively. This portion of the project was most time consuming but also the most interesting. I conducted research on children that had ADHD and Dyslexia by interviewing the learning support teachers at my school. I had the privilege to interview 2 of the teacher and I was able to have a better understanding of the two learning conditions. One point which I would like to highlight is “dyslexic people often miss every third word and if you can imagine giving an instruction to somebody and they miss every third word. It like when you’re on the phone on a bad phone line .” in my opinion this was the most interesting and important part of the interview as it made me have a better insight and understanding to how those with Dyslexia think.

To try further my research I created a survey in which I got the grade 2’s to fill out. These questions varied from “do you like school?” to “do you know what Dyslexia or ADHD is?” I found these results rather interesting. There were no children who knew what ADHD was and a few knew what Dyslexia was. One of the participants said that they had ADHD however they weren’t sure what it was. This question allowed to me come to the conclusion that there was in fact a great need for my product in society as many of the children who have such learning obstacles aren’t being helped as much as they need. In school class rooms today there are not many to no multisensorial books which allow these children to learn more effectively and easier. This type of issue needs to be further incorporated into the school system. As well as that my survey found that over 80% of students said that they found something to do with writing, reading or learning a new language(in most cases English) the most challenging thing in school, this result further backs my point of allowing children to learn easier especially those whose first language isn’t English.

Conclusion

My project was not only about helping children with ADHD and/or Dyslexia it was about helping those who are unable to speak or read in English learn. I conducted much research on how a child is effected if they are constantly moving from country to country. I found out that many children are unable to make friends and have long lasting friendships as distance is difficult. Many children have no sense of home or a place of belonging. I found this quiet interesting as I had never thought about this type of issue before as I have never moved in my life so thinking in another perspective was very interesting and eye opening.