Tvítyngd börn, orðaforði og sögulestur

Previous research has indicated that bilingual children in Icelandic preschools have a smaller vocabulary in Icelandic than monolingual peers who were first-language learners of Icelandic. The aim of this study was to investigate children’s vocabulary learning using a storybook reading intervention. The impact of explicit teaching and indirect teaching approaches was compared for target vocabulary. The participants were two bilingual children who had Polish as a home language. Both children were in their last year of preschool (5-6 years old) in Iceland. In the direct teaching approach, each target word was explained when it appeared in the text and explained. In the indirect approach, the story was read without explanation of the target words. The intervention used a single-case multiple baseline design, with two intervention blocks of three weeks duration each. Analysis of children’s vocabulary knowledge showed that direct instruction was more effective than indirect instruction. Also, the intervention (direct and indirect) had positive effect on the number of different words the children used in spontaneous speech samples. This intervention approach may therefore be useful as an approach to increase the Icelandic vocabulary of bilingual children.