Abstract:
The aim of the current research is to understand Chinese kindergarten teachers’ perception of ‘quality’ wordless picture books underthe impact ofrecent Chinese education policies. To investigate their challenges and strategies for Chinese kindergarten teachers to engage children with wordless picture book during the pandemic. In the new round of Chinese education reform, great attention has been paid to the development of children, especially the development of children’s language. Picture books as appropriate reading materials suitable for children’s reading, which meet the needs of children’s development, are more and more used by preschool teachers as an important carrier of emerge literacy teaching (Jin, 2018; Kang, Zhou & Mao, 2020). Therefore, the teaching of picture book reading has received extensive attention and application. Simultaneously, high quality children’s literature provides readers with opportunities to enhance their cultural knowledge, emotional intelligence, personal identity, and social development. However, the guideline and criteria of selecting quality picture book have not been released by Chinese government yet (He, 2016; Minister of Education of the People’s Republic China, 2019 & 2020). Wordless picture book maximizes the expressive power of “language” in pictures by omitting words and languages, it (Leonard, Lorch, Milich, & Hagans, 2009). The wordless picture book can tolerate children’s lack of word recognition, and at the same time put forward higher learning requirements for children (Lysaker & Hopper, 2015). At present, picture books have been widely used in early reading teaching in Chinese kindergartens, but as the wordless picture books in the picture book family, they have been relatively neglected (Han & Wang, 2013). On the other hand, in the book market, there are not many wordless picture books introduced in China, and the number of wordless picture books published in China is even rarer, which is not conducive to the selection and enrichment of children’s picture book reading materials (Han & Wang, 2013) To further understand the current situation of Beijing preschool teachers’ wordless picture book selection, the current research establishes a mixed-method, case study approach, by adopting document analysis, survey and semi-structured interviews as the data collection method. The Funds of Knowledge and transactional reader-response theory support the researcher to gain deeper understanding of preschool teachers’ perception on quality picture book and the root of their knowledge and take corresponding measures to better understand the teaching practice of picture book teaching in kindergartens and problems arising from the selection of quality picture books.