Using television to expand the vocabulary of beginning readers

The research and development project Sirius Thinking, Ltd., (co-producer of the award-winning children s educational television series Between the Lions) is proposing to conduct in Phase II is intended to assess the effectiveness of video segments in teaching English vocabulary to native English-speaking children and Spanish-speaking English language learning children. Based on our successful Phase I feasibility study and through consultations with leading educational researchers in the area of children s literacy, we will develop these techniques into entertaining and educational video segments. We will produce a wide variety of vocabulary-focused video segments, and embed them in six episodes of Between the Lions that we will screen for 240 kindergarten and first grade students from two New York City public schools. We will also compile these segments onto a DVD for many of the students to take home to view. Through an experimental research design, we will establish the success of our product by measuring growth in program-specific receptive and expressive vocabulary. We will also examine the literacy gains of these students in the areas of phonemic awareness and letter-sound correspondence.