Toward A Systemic Strategy For Selecting And Using Picture Books In Elementary School EFL Teaching

In contemporary EFL teaching in China's elementary schools,teachers are selecting and using increasingly more English picture books,but they still lack a systemic strategy for selecting and utilizing English picture books.In elementary school EFL teaching research,scholars have conducted various studies in the choice and use of English picture books,but up to the present they have failed to formulate a systemic strategy for selecting and using English picture books.This study,therefore,firstly develops a systemic strategy,or a set of systemic view,theory,method,and procedure,for the selection and use of English picture books in elementary school English teaching in the light of dialectical systemic thinking,on the basis of Arthur D.Hall's three-dimensional morphology of system engineering and pertinent theories and methods of language learning and teaching,and through a rational methodology combining deduction and induction.This strategy vertically consists of a systemic meta-strategy and a systemic strategy for selecting and using English picture books in elementary school EFL teaching.Among them,the former is the strategy for managing the latter.The latter is composed of the systemic view,theory,method and procedure of the selection and use of English picture books in elementary school EFL teaching.In particular,the systemic procedure of selecting and using picture books horizontally consists of problem identification,goal setting,system synthesis,system analysis,plan optimization,decision making,and implementation.Secondly,this study carries out an experiment to verify the formulated strategy in terms of its effect on learning motivation and on learning efficiency,with 70 sixth year students from two classes of a certain elementary school in China as subjects,with two questionnaires on the effect of English picture books in motivating students' learning and two English proficiency tests as research instruments,in the form of one semester's(or 19 weeks')implementation of the proposed strategy,and through the procedure of pre-test,pre-questionnaire survey,implementation of strategy,post-test,and post-questionnaire survey.Results generated from the experiment demonstrate that the systemic strategy for the selection and use of English picture books in elementary school EFL teaching can effectively improve the students' English learning motivation and interests and their English learning efficiency.Hopefully,this study may be significant to elementary school EFL teaching practice and its research in that it may provide teachers a systemic strategy for choosing and using English picture books with positive effects on students' motivation and achievement and that it may reduce the inadequacy of existing research in developing such systemic strategies of teaching.