The current study is going to investigate the effects of dialogic instruction and storybook on young children’s construction of physical knowledge and social knowledge in Kunming kindergartens. Regarding the existing literatures, there are still some research gaps.

Previous studies shed light on children’s knowledge construction and comprehension (King, 1994; King & Rosenshine, 1993), but there are limited empirical evidence on the individual differences in the constructions of physical and social knowledge. Moreover, while it has been argued by many researchers that dialogic reading positively influences children’s language skills and early emergent literacy (Valdez-Menchaca & Whitehurst, 1992; Whitehurst et al., 1988), little is known about the relative effects of dialogic instruction and text on children’s knowledge construction. Therefore, this study is going to fill in the literature gaps and make contributions in this field.

There are three key theories contained in this study. This first one is Jean Piaget’s constructivism. Piaget (1970) assumed that children’s cognitive and social development follow a fixed sequence of stages. He argued that preschoolers who are in the preoperational stage are assumed to merely focus on the perceptual aspects and ignore invariant features in conservation tasks, failing to integrate information from two or more dimensions when solving the problem (Siegal, 1997). Meanwhile, the lack of competence in understanding other people’s perspectives and feelings may lead to low level of conflict resolution skills of young children (Barnett & Littlejohn, 1997; Stone, Patton, & Heen, 1999). However, it has been argued by other researchers that even though two individuals have the same pattern of cognitive development, their paces of development are hardly the same and their performances are subjected to the influences of learning, experiences, and social context (Bliss, 2002; Siegal, 1997).

The second one is Lev Vygotsky’s Social Constructivism. Vygotsky argued that children’s knowledge is built from the social interaction (Vygotsky, 1978). During the adult-child interactions, adults can offer children the instructional support and scaffold them to promote their higher-order thinking skills (La Paro, Pianta, & Stuhlman, 2004). Meanwhile, children internalize social speech and attitude through interactions with others during these activities, which promote their understanding of social knowledge (Wells, 2004). In this way, dialogic instructions applied in the child-teacher interactions can establish a collaborative learning environment in the classroom (Pramling, 1988), which not only engage young children in productive and purposeful activities such as problem-solving and reasoning (Wells, 2004), but also expand children’s social world and improve their cognitive socialization (Faulkner, Joiner, Littleton, Miell, & Thompson, 2000).

The third one is Michael Halliday’s discourse theory. As Halliday declared, it is essential to make a bridge between the text and the situation, and that bridge turns out to be the discourse (Halliday, 1993; Halliday & Hasan, 1985; 1989). Therefore, the affirmed relationship between the text and the situation is significant for people’s interaction and co-construction of knowledge (Wells, 2004). Storybook is a useful education tool to support children’s cognitive development and adult-child interactions can facilitate children’s acquisition of new knowledge (Kotaman & Balcı, 2017). In addition, storybook is an effective instrument to assist children’s socio-emotional development because it provides young children with language and information that they can apply in the social interactions with other people (Aram & Aviram, 2009).

Therefore, here are the hypotheses of this study:

H1a & H1b: Children show individual differences in understanding of physical and social knowledge despite their assumed preoperational stage.

H2a & H2b: Children who receive dialogic instruction have better construction of physical and social knowledge than children without dialogic instruction.

H3a & H3b: Text (storybook) enhances children’s construction of physical and social knowledge.

This study will last for 11 weeks: with the first two weeks of pre-tests; three weeks of without-text experimental sessions; one week of mid-test; three weeks of experimental sessions with a text and last two weeks of post-tests. The experiment will adopt a within-subject, repeated-measure design to explore two conditions: dialogic vs on-dialogic instruction and absence/presence of a storybook. Pretest, mid-test, and post-test will be administered to compare and measure treatment effects. The study will be conducted in the preschool context. Four different kindergartens in Kunming will be recruited to minimize the selection bias. A minimum sample of forty-eight K3 children at 5-6 years old will be recruited from four kindergartens and not identified with SEN. Participating children will be divided randomly into two groups: dialogic group, and non-dialogic group. Children will remain in the same group for the whole study. Three instruments will be used in this study. Physical knowledge will be assessed with conservation tasks from the Conservation Scale (Goldschmid, 1967; Goldschmid & Bentler, 1968). Pictures involving conflict resolution in the Social Orientation Model (Reunamo, 2004) will be adapted to test social knowledge. Finally, The Twin Brothers—Conservation of Physical Quantities (Liu, 1991) will be used as the storybook in dialogic instruction. Three experimental sessions will be conducted to evaluate the level of learner engagement of children. The researcher will act as the teacher and invite children to participate in the experimental sessions, and the instructions used by the researcher will be different in terms of sessions. The main difference of tasks between the first three sessions and the last three sessions is the text’s presence. Besides, the content of tasks is slightly different to minimize the influence of children’s memory. Also, the instructions used by the researcher will vary in terms of groups. The researcher will provide children in the dialogic group with more question-feedback loops, concept development and language modelling to engage children in active interactions. For example, in the dialogic group, the researcher will ask more questions and invite children to share their thoughts. Children can also touch the material and try to experiment themselves. However, children in the non-dialogic group will not have the same chance.

This study is expected to provide essential empirical data for exploring the teacher’s instruction and storybook on preschool children’s knowledge construction in the Kunming context. The collected data will be analyzed in two aspects. The first part is a multilevel analysis. Children’s knowledge construction will be measured respectively by their performances in six conservation tasks and six conflict resolution tasks. At the child level, individual differences, such as age, gender, and SES background, will be included to measure the interaction effect (H1a & H1b). The second part of data analysis is the structural equation modelling. The H2a, H2b, H3a and H3b are the interaction of the two conditions, the instruction and the text, which measures the interaction effect in the within-subject level. It is expected that adult-child effective dialogic interactions may influence children’s development of physical and social knowledge, despite their developmental stages. The results of children’s knowledge development with conditions involving experiences of dialogical instruction, a story about conservation and conflict resolution, and teacher-child interaction are assumed to be better than children’s knowledge development in conditions without these experiences. The expected results may promote further studies in this field within the Kunming context. The study will also shed light on the implications that it is beneficial to encourage dialogue as chains of questions in the classroom, not only through teacher-child dialogues (Alexander, 2004) but also through the establishment of communities of inquiry (Wells, 2004). Comparing two different reading and teaching instructions may provide a possible choice for teachers in Kunming to promote young children’s progress and development.

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