Using television to expand the vocabulary of beginning readers

Sirius Thinking, Ltd., co-producer of the award-winning children’s educational television series Between the Lions (BTL), is proposing to develop and test new video segments that will serve to increase vocabulary knowledge of English speaking and English language learning (ELL) children. These segments will complement the literacy curriculum that is currently presented on BTL. Through consultations with leading educational researchers in the area of children’s literacy, we will identify vocabulary teaching techniques for English speaking children and Spanish-speaking ELL children and develop these techniques into prototypes of video segments that feature the characters from BTL. We will test the feasibility of these prototype segments by embedding them into one episode of the original BTL series, and into one episode of the ELL version of the BTL series. Through an experimental research design, we will gauge program-specific vocabulary gains of kindergarten and first grade students using a pre/post-test measure. Our Phase I findings will serve as the blueprint for future vocabulary segments that will be included in multiple episodes of our original BTL series and the ELL BTL series. Phase II research will test the effectiveness of prolonged exposure to these multiple episodes on vocabulary acquisition for both these populations.