Evaluating Dora The Explorer As A TV Program For Children's Second Language Vocabulary And Literacy Development

Nowadays children's English teaching programs are widely used in schools and homes.Many researches have also demonstrated that TV programs can help children learn the second language.However,few studies have analyzed the contents of these programs from the perspective of English teaching.Therefore,this paper selects the most popular children's English teaching program Dora the Explorer as the research sample,and makes a detailed analysis from the view of second language vocabulary and literacy development.This study randomly selected 15 episodes as the researching sample.Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are used in this study.Firstly,the sampled data were transcribed and described in words.Then,according to the established classification methods,the vocabulary,the teaching methods and the emergent literacy knowledge found in the sampled data were classified and analyzed one by one.Based on the analysis,the sampled data contain 5,096 vocabulary in total,and 262 different vocabulary after eliminating the repetitions.On average there are 17 different vocabulary in each episode.Nouns are found to be the most frequently occurred group in the data,which is suitable for children to learn.As for the teaching methods,except for 67 cases did not use instructional methods and the method of definition was not found,the rest of six methods occurred 2631 times.Among them,repetition is the most frequently used method.In addition,the analysis found that the sampled data contains some aspects of literacy development.However,this part of the content is relatively simple,and can not have a significant impact on cultivating the children's literacy.In a word,Dora the Explorer contains a relatively abundant vocabulary and using a variety of teaching methods in vocabulary teaching.And it also contains some enlightenment knowledge of literacy.Therefore,from the perspective of English teaching,this cartoon can be regarded as having a high quality and this paper also provides a certain reference for the production of other children's English education programs.