Reading Online: International Perspectives -- Exploring the Potential of D-LEA

Exploring the Potential of the Digital Language Experience Approach in Australian Classrooms

For a printer-ready version of this article, click here. Use your browser’s “back” button to return to the Reading Online site.

Back in the 1970s, I used the language experience approach (LEA) in my teaching of five- and six-year-old beginning readers. This approach is based on the premise that if children can tell their stories and someone else can scribe those stories for them, they will then be able to read their work. Two major sources, Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1963) and Lorraine Wilson (1979), convinced me that I should use this approach to teach my young students to read.
It was very successful. My students created individual LEA booklets and together we created class books. I used the stories to teach the children their phonics, their high frequency words, punctuation, and much, much more. I began to see the advantages of modeled writing -- scribing a child’s story and thinking aloud about the process I was going through to spell the words and so on. Our class library filled with the children’s books and these were read and reread by my students.
Related Postings from the Archives

Digital Language Experience Approach by Linda Labbo et al.
Kindergarten Stories by Susan Caroff et al.
Getting Kindergarteners Started with Technology by Jan Turbill

The language experience approach is still used, with many variations, in most Australian classrooms today, as one of many strategies in the teaching of reading. It has been found to be particularly useful for students from non-English-speaking backgrounds who are beginning to learn English and English script.

The primary teachers in whose classrooms I have been researching for several years certainly use LEA in their daily literacy blocks. But although they have indicated to me often that they feel very comfortable using such traditional teaching approaches, they also are aware that they need somehow to incorporate the computers they have in their classrooms into this teaching. Knowing what and how to do this has been very much part of our challenge and the focus of my recent research (Turbill, 2001a, 2001b [online document]). And so when I read Labbo, Eakle, and Montero’s (2002, online document) account of using digital language experience (D-LEA) in kindergarten classrooms, I thought, “Yes! That will work!” Here was a clear description of how teachers in U.S. kindergarten classrooms linked technology with a traditional approach to teaching literacy. As I read the article, I began to envisage how I could introduce D-LEA to the teachers who were part of my classroom-based research.

The purpose of the phase of my research reported here was to try D-LEA in an Australian context. We needed to know how it would work, what would be needed with respect to resources and the professional development of the teachers and the parent volunteers who had become so much a part of the literacy program in the kindergarten and grade 1 classrooms. This article demonstrates this process and its outcomes as we work toward the goal of introducing D-LEA to additional classrooms in subsequent school years.

My Research | Enter D-LEA | Exploring the Potential of D-LEA | Results and Future Directions | References

My Research

My ongoing research focus over the past few years has been to find ways of helping primary grade teachers incorporate technology into their literacy curricula. I am interested to find out why teachers of young children seem to be active resistors about using technology (Snyder, 1996), despite curriculum mandates that require them to do so. (See Turbill, 2001a, 2001b, for details).

Since 1999, I have spent one morning a week in a large urban elementary school in Sydney, NSW, Australia. This school has five kindergarten classes of five- and six-year-olds, and five Year 1 classes of six- and seven-year-olds. Most children are English language learners from Chinese-speaking families, though there are some 25 different language backgrounds in the school.

Early findings emerging from my research indicated that teachers

Felt guilty about letting children “play” with the various talking books and other software they had access to, as these activities didn’t appear to be “real” literacy learning
Had a narrow definition of literacy that included only print and paper-based texts
Lacked confidence in their own abilities to use digital texts (let alone create them) and to teach their students to use them
Lacked the time to play with the current software or to search the Internet for ideas and information (Turbill, 2001a)

The challenge I faced as a result of these early findings was to explore ways of supporting teachers as they did try to implement technology. One plan put into place was the Kindergarten Volunteer Program. The school executive invited a cadre of volunteers to come daily and observe and support the kindergartners as they “played” at the computers. My role was to act as a liaison to the volunteers, provide workshops to show them what to do, and monitor the program (Turbill, 2001b). This program has worked well. The children develop basic computer skills (using the mouse, matching cursor and mouse, understanding the function of icons, and so on) as well as a language for talking about their computer use (mouse, icon, click, double click, drag, and more) by the end of the school year. This knowledge I call “concepts of screen” (after Clay, 1976).

Once we had a way to help all children become confident and competent users of the computers, our challenge was deciding what to teach them next. The teachers had worked out a way to use the old listening post sets with the computers, so that a group of children could listen to and read animated predictable stories such as Galaxy Kids (Sunshine, 1999). But this and the talking book CD-ROMs held their interest for only so long. The teachers and volunteers were now asking for more -- but what?

Back to menu
Figure 1
Children Using Listening Posts at a Classroom Computer

Enter the Digital Language Experience Approach

I first heard about D-LEA from Linda Labbo of the University of Georgia, when we met at the International Reading Association conference in San Francisco in April 2002. I even had a personal “in-service” over coffee with Linda, as she showed me the work that the children who participated in her research had produced. I was able to ask many questions about the process she and her colleagues went through with the teachers and children in their project. I was intrigued by what I heard and saw.

Later at the conference, I heard Gretchen Espinetti (2002) from Kent State University talk about a project in which she had given young preschoolers digital cameras that they could use to take their own photos. She then downloaded the pictures to a computer and had the children provide her with a label or caption for each one, which she scribed for them. I had just bought a small lightweight digital camera and Gretchen’s project gave me something to ponder.

I returned to Australia with these new ideas and shared them with the principal and several of the teachers at the school where I conduct my research. I took along a new Reading Online article Linda and her colleagues had written about their work with D-LEA. After the principal and teachers read the article, it was decided that I should try D-LEA with several first grade children so that I would have a product to show the other teachers. I hoped that this action research project would provide me with a clearer understanding of the processes involved in D-LEA as well as its potential benefits for the children in this school. As Linda and her colleagues noted in their article, “As promising as recent research and instructional ideas have been, we realized that much remains to be learned about effective ways to integrate LEA with digital photography and creativity software in the early childhood classroom.”

Back to menu

Exploring the Potential of D-LEA in Australian Classrooms: The Research Study

The project used a mix of action research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988) and case study (Merriam, 1998) methodologies. Burns (1997, p. 346) indicates that “action research is the application of fact-finding to practical problem-solving in a social situation with a view to improving the quality of action within it, involving the collaboration and cooperation of researchers, practitioners and laymen.” Kemmis and McTaggart describe it as “trying out ideas in practice as a means of improvement and as a means of increasing knowledge about the curriculum, teaching, and learning” (p. 6).

I was a participant-observer within the study, and developed a relationship with the children and their teachers. Guba and Lincoln (1989, p. 11) would label this a “respondent as co-researcher” relationship, whereby participants are “accorded the privilege of sharing their constructions and working toward a common, consensual, more fully informed and sophisticated, joint construction“ and ”a full measure of conceptual parity.”

The methods used in action research and case study research are similar. However, as Merriam (1998) points out, the use of case study methodology allows for case reports to be developed that can suggest to readers what they might do in similar situations.

Adapting D-LEA

For this project, the procedures outlined by Labbo, Eakle, and Montero (2002) were adapted as follows:

The teachers in this research had access to Microsoft’s PowerPoint software and many had used it in their professional work or in university studies. Thus, we felt that this software would suit our purposes better than the creativity software used by Labbo and her colleagues.
Two children would be selected to participate in the initial research. The children would take the lead and select the photos they wanted to take with the digital camera (after Espinetti, 2002).
Because the children were in first grade and already beginning to read and write, they would be encouraged to compose and write their own stories, rather than having the teacher act as scribe.

The two children selected to participate in the project, Penny and Justin, were six-year-olds from the same class (called “1M”). Their teacher deemed them to be average readers and writers for their age. Penny was the only child in the class who spoke English as a first language. Justin came from a Chinese-speaking background and, in fact, he returned to China for several months with his parents to visit a sick grandfather during the course of this project. This meant that while Justin helped Penny take the initial photos, he was not at school when it came time to write up the digital books.

Getting Started

Penny and Justin knew me because they had been involved in earlier school-based research I had done in their classroom. When the teacher asked if they would like to be part of some “special work” with me, both accepted enthusiastically. The three of us went to a quiet corner of the school library, where I showed them the small digital camera and laptop computer. I had prepared a short PowerPoint presentation using four digital photos taken of the children in their class. I called the presentation, “1M at Work.” I had written a brief caption under each image that described what was going on. For instance, one slide showed an image of a girl writing lists of words on a small chalkboard, with the caption, “Melody can spell lots of words.” Another slide showed one boy reading a small book to another in the classroom book corner. The caption underneath read, “Jason is reading to Simon.”

I showed the children the presentation as a slide show, and they read the captions with me and talked about the photographs. I told them that we would call this a “digital book” because it was on the computer and not in paper form.

I then explained that they were going to make digital books with my help. They would take the photos, decide on the order of the photos, and write the stories, and then we would show the rest of the class. I also explained that this would take several weeks because I could only come to their classroom one morning a week. I told Justin and Penny that the purpose of the activity was to prepare a digital book that could be used to introduce children who begin school at all times of the year to the key people and places in the school. These books would be used to help the new children get to know their way around more quickly.

We spent several minutes talking about the sorts of things that children who were new to the school might need to know. The interaction between the two children was very lively -- this was particularly noticeable with Justin, who did not say much in class. Penny suggested that before taking the photos they wanted, they should list the things that they thought were important so they didn’t forget. They each spent some time writing their respective lists. Although the order of items differed, they both listed the library, the toilet block, the canteen, the safe area to play, the staff room, the office, and the Bell Tower (the oldest part of the school, where the school bell once resided).

I showed them how to use the digital camera, and off we went.

Taking the Digital Photos

We walked around the school, and Penny and Justin took turns taking their photos. I was amazed at what they chose to focus on at each of the sites. For instance, in the library I would have photographed the books, or a group of older students working on the computers, or the teacher reading to some younger children. Penny chose to photograph the many awards and trophies that school teams had won for debating, soccer, and more. These were kept in a glass-covered cupboard high on the wall.

Penny chatted away as she took her photos -- sometimes talking to herself, sometimes explaining to me why she was taking a particular photo. Occasionally she asked my opinion about a site or angle. Every now and again she checked her list. Justin, on the other hand, said very little. Each time it was his turn to take a photo, he simply looked around and then aimed the camera, took the shot, and returned the camera to Penny.

Back in the library I downloaded the 24 photos taken onto my laptop, and we looked at the images to see if we needed them all. Several were out of focus or simply did not match up with the children’s expectations, so these were deleted.

Preparing the Digital Book

Before our next meeting, Justin returned to China, so only Penny came with me to the library quiet area for the second session. I showed her how to import the images into PowerPoint. I did the first five, and then Penny took over and quickly learned how to do the rest. Before we could write an accompanying text, I showed Penny the “storyboard” (slide sort) view of PowerPoint (Figure 2) and asked her to order the images to best suit the purposes of her digital book.

Figure 2
Slide Sort Display of a PowerPoint Presentation

series of images in PowerPoint slide sorter view

After a brief demonstration, Penny quickly ordered the images for her digital book. While there were more than 20 photos available, Penny chose to include only the 10 images that she had photographed, which she arranged in the order in which they had been taken. Penny asked me to “get rid of” the rest, “’cause they are Justin’s.” I obliged by saving Justin’s photos in a separate folder on my computer called “Justin’s Photos,” so he could use these once he returned from China.

Our next step was to write the captions to go with each photograph.

Writing the Captions

One the third day of the project, we went to a quiet spot in the library again and used my laptop. Penny had never used a touchpad before and found it fascinating. It didn’t take her long to get used to it.

I began by reminding Penny of the day we took the photos, and then I showed her the photos she had selected and ordered in slide sort view. I then asked her to write a story to go with each of her photos. Penny spent some time talking about each one, changed their order, and even deleted a few. For instance, she decided she would delete a photo of a teacher who taught older children and whom she really didn’t know. “I don’t need this teacher,” she commented. “New kindies [kindergartners] won’t see her, and anyway I don’t know her name.” Penny was left with six slides.

What follows are excerpts from my field notes of that day. On the left are Penny’s slides, showing images and her final, corrected captions; on the right I explain what happened during the writing.

photo and caption of school quiet area The first slide showed the quiet area. Penny began to write her caption straight away, without saying the sentence aloud. She knew about the space bar and how to delete when she made a mistake. Insisting on two spaces between each word (the children are asked to leave a two-finger space between words when they do their best handwriting), she keyed, “The qiet eria is a plas wir you need to be qiet.” The software spell-check feature automatically underlined spelling errors in red. This did not bother her once I explained we would come back and fix these later.

photo and caption of school canteen Penny commented that “when you write ‘this’ you always write ‘is’ after it.” She also pointed out that canteen was easy because it was “can” and “teen.” When she first wrote this word, she keyed canten and said, “Look, I have wrote ‘ten’ but I need ‘teen’.” I asked her to write “tree” with my pencil on a piece of paper. This Penny did and said, “Oh, yeah. I have to write two es.” With this she deleted the n and wrote “canteen.”

photo and caption of children outside Penny wrote this correctly. (“1P” is another first grade class.) When I asked her whether she wanted to write some more (the children were out in the safe play area, part of the school grounds she had listed as important to photograph and the reason she had taken the picture), she commented, “No, they need it short.”

photo and caption of trophy case Penny was getting frustrated with the time it was taking her to find the letters on the keyboard, so she began playing a little game of running her fingers along each row. This created a problem, however, because she sometimes hit keys that she didn’t want and she would then have to go back and correct errors in the text. She became quite annoyed about this, and commented, “I will just look at the keys and fix it up later. Right?” Then she noted, “They [the order of the letters on the keyboard] should be like the alphabet. That would be easier.” Penny kept rereading to check that she wasn’t leaving words out and she sounded out the words she didn’t know. Before we edited it, her caption read “If you win a aword this is some of them.”

photo and caption of school bell tower This image is of the school’s more than 100-year-old bell tower, and Penny captioned it with “THE BELL TOWA IS OWD.” She decided that since this was an important building, she would write the caption in uppercase letters so “people would know it is old.” When I asked whether she wanted to explain anything else about the bell tower, Penny said, “No, they won’t read it if it is too long.” Penny’s sense of audience was quite amazing.

photo and caption of tree When Penny first took this photo she told me that the tree had beautiful blue flowers, although she could only find one in bloom to photograph. She reminded me about this when she was deciding what to write. I asked her why she liked the tree and she replied, “Because it has blue flowers like my uniform. See?” With that she pulled on the polo neck of her top to show me. Then she keyed, “ The flows are blue like our school yoonifor.”

photo and caption of Penny At this point, Penny was getting tired and the bell rang for break time. She remembered that Justin had taken a photo of her and she asked where it was. We returned to the “Justin’s Photos” on my computer, and I showed her the photo in the slide sorter frame. I inserted it into a new PowerPoint slide and asked her where it should go. She quickly responded, “It goes first, because this tells the kids who I am and you put that at the front, not the end.” She moved it first and wrote, “I am Penny in 1M.” When she finished, she looked at me and asked, “Will people know that 1M means I am in Year 1?” I responded that I didn’t think so. “No, they won’t,” she added, and then wrote, “That mens Year 1.”

Happy with what she had written, Penny asked to look at the slides as a digital book. I showed Penny how to access the slideshow view, and she confidently read each of her slides, clicking to move to each new one. Penny told me that after the break, she would come back and we could “fix the spelling with red under it.” Off she went to break.

When Penny came back, we quickly corrected the spelling and I inserted a title page that simply said “Happy School.” Penny was ready to read her digital book to her teacher and the class.

Back to menu

Results and Future Directions

This action research project with its adaptations supports the findings of both Labbo, Eakle, and Montero (2002) and Espinetti (2002). Like Labbo et al., my colleagues and I believe that D-LEA incorporates all the best aspects of the language experience approach, with the added advantage of teaching children to use digital literacies. It seems to be an approach that suits the needs of both the teachers and the students in this particular school.

Penny had a real purpose and audience for creating her digital book. She worked hard to make sure that it was “right.” Her sense of audience and willingness to edit and proofread her work (in fact, she insisted on doing so) are indeed unusual for this age group. Finding authentic purposes for children’s writing is another difficult challenge for teachers. The digital language experience approach seems to be an effective means of responding to this challenge.

Teachers working with English language learners in this school have been concerned about providing sufficient opportunities for the children to talk in English. What was evident in this project was that because Penny and Justin photographed things that all the children in the class could recognize, there was a common and well-known context to talk about, which meant there was a shared experience and common language for the children. Furthermore, the digital books could be shared easily among all the kindergarten and first grade classrooms. In fact, the digital book described in this article is now available on the school intranet and can be accessed by everyone, including the teachers of English as a second language (ESL). As the photographs are shared, children talk about them, add to Penny’s version, or even write their own captions and create a personalized slide show. The children love to see photos of themselves and their friends displayed on the computer, and teachers predict that the children will want to read the digital books over and over again.

This project has also suggested a possible solution to another major issue that is emerging in this school. The teachers have become concerned that the many Chinese-speaking children seem to be memorizing English spellings and words but do not necessarily attribute meaning to these. For many of these children, their initial literacy experience in China was associated with the recognition and memorization of radicals that make up Chinese characters (Carson, 1992). In the Australian ESL classroom, these children may need to be encouraged to move away from the literacy practice of memorizing word shapes to recognizing the meanings attached to these shapes. Digital photographs can be seen and comprehended by all children, regardless of their first language; thus, there is shared meaning attributed to those photographs. Once the photograph is embedded in a document, the children or teacher can use appropriate software to write what it is about, in both English and the first language of the child. Such enhancements could engage children in recognizing contextual features of language, and would thus facilitate negotiation between the literacy practices of the childen’s first and second languages.

The logistics are already in place for carrying out these activities in this school. The Kindergarten Volunteer Program includes many people who can read and write in both English and Chinese (and other languages also) and who are willing to work with individual or small groups of children under the guidance of the teacher. Workshops can be set up to show the volunteers how to use a digital camera and PowerPoint.

A second group of willing helpers for the first grade and kindergarten classes can be found among the older children at the school. The 10- to 12-year-olds are frequently already competent users of digital cameras and appropriate software. A practice in the school has been for upper grade classes to “buddy” with lower grades. As many of these children are already bilingual, they too can be used to support the grade one and kindergarten teachers develop digital books in many languages.

The small action research project reported here has helped us explore the potential of D-LEA. It has opened far more doors than we at first thought possible. We recently received two grants to explore further the development of bilingual, and even multilingual, digital books. The research continues.

Back to menu

References

Ashton-Warner, S. (1963). Teacher. London: Bantam.
Back

Burns, R.B. (1997). Introduction to research methods (3rd ed.). South Melbourne, Australia: Addison Wesley Longman Australia.
Back

Carson, J.G. (1992). Becoming biliterate: First language influences. Journal of Second Language Writing, 1(1), 37-60.
Back

Clay, M. (1979). The early detection of reading difficulties (2nd ed.). Auckland, NZ: Heinemann.
Back

Espinetti, G. (2002, April). Images that capture stories of our worlds: A new literacy for preschoolers. Paper presented at the 47th Annual Convention of the International Reading Association, San Francisco, CA.
Back

Galaxy Kids. (1999). Auckland, NZ: Sunshine Multimedia, Wendy Pye.
Back

Guba, E., & Lincoln, Y. (1989). Fourth generation evaluation. San Francisco, CA: Sage.
Back

Kemmis, S., & McTaggart, R. (1988). The action research planner (3rd ed.). Waurn Ponds, Vic., Australia: Deakin University Press.
Back

Labbo, L.D., Eakle, A.J., & Montero, M.K. (2002, May). Digital language experience approach: Using digital photographs and software as a language experience approach innovation. Reading Online, 5(8). Available: www.readingonline.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?HREF=labbo2/
Back

Merriam, S. (1998). Qualitative research and case study applications in education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass..
Back

Snyder, I. (1996). Integrating computers into the literacy curriculum: More difficult than we think. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 19(4), 330-344.
Back

Turbill, J. (2001a). A researcher goes to school: The integration of technology into the early literacy curriculum. Journal of Early Literacy, 1(3), 255-279.
Back

Turbill, J. (2001b, July/August). Getting kindergarteners started with technology: The story of one school. Reading Online, 5(1). Available: www.readingonline.org/international/inter_index.asp?HREF=turbill2/
Back

Wilson, L. (1979). Write me a sign. Melbourne, Australia: Nelson Education.
Back

For a printer-ready version of this article, click here.

Citation: Turbill, J. (2003, March). Exploring the potential of the digital language experience approach in Australian classrooms. Reading Online, 6(7). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/international/inter_index.asp?HREF=turbill7/

	The first slide showed the quiet area. Penny began to write her caption straight away, without saying the sentence aloud. She knew about the space bar and how to delete when she made a mistake. Insisting on two spaces between each word (the children are asked to leave a two-finger space between words when they do their best handwriting), she keyed, “The qiet eria is a plas wir you need to be qiet.” The software spell-check feature automatically underlined spelling errors in red. This did not bother her once I explained we would come back and fix these later.
	Penny commented that “when you write ‘this’ you always write ‘is’ after it.” She also pointed out that canteen was easy because it was “can” and “teen.” When she first wrote this word, she keyed canten and said, “Look, I have wrote ‘ten’ but I need ‘teen’.” I asked her to write “tree” with my pencil on a piece of paper. This Penny did and said, “Oh, yeah. I have to write two es.” With this she deleted the n and wrote “canteen.”
	Penny wrote this correctly. (“1P” is another first grade class.) When I asked her whether she wanted to write some more (the children were out in the safe play area, part of the school grounds she had listed as important to photograph and the reason she had taken the picture), she commented, “No, they need it short.”
	Penny was getting frustrated with the time it was taking her to find the letters on the keyboard, so she began playing a little game of running her fingers along each row. This created a problem, however, because she sometimes hit keys that she didn’t want and she would then have to go back and correct errors in the text. She became quite annoyed about this, and commented, “I will just look at the keys and fix it up later. Right?” Then she noted, “They [the order of the letters on the keyboard] should be like the alphabet. That would be easier.” Penny kept rereading to check that she wasn’t leaving words out and she sounded out the words she didn’t know. Before we edited it, her caption read “If you win a aword this is some of them.”
	This image is of the school’s more than 100-year-old bell tower, and Penny captioned it with “THE BELL TOWA IS OWD.” She decided that since this was an important building, she would write the caption in uppercase letters so “people would know it is old.” When I asked whether she wanted to explain anything else about the bell tower, Penny said, “No, they won’t read it if it is too long.” Penny’s sense of audience was quite amazing.
	When Penny first took this photo she told me that the tree had beautiful blue flowers, although she could only find one in bloom to photograph. She reminded me about this when she was deciding what to write. I asked her why she liked the tree and she replied, “Because it has blue flowers like my uniform. See?” With that she pulled on the polo neck of her top to show me. Then she keyed, “ The flows are blue like our school yoonifor.”
	At this point, Penny was getting tired and the bell rang for break time. She remembered that Justin had taken a photo of her and she asked where it was. We returned to the “Justin’s Photos” on my computer, and I showed her the photo in the slide sorter frame. I inserted it into a new PowerPoint slide and asked her where it should go. She quickly responded, “It goes first, because this tells the kids who I am and you put that at the front, not the end.” She moved it first and wrote, “I am Penny in 1M.” When she finished, she looked at me and asked, “Will people know that 1M means I am in Year 1?” I responded that I didn’t think so. “No, they won’t,” she added, and then wrote, “That mens Year 1.”