‘After Mom Gets Some Books, Then I’ll Make a Selection’: A 5-Year-Old ELL’s Decision-Making in the Book-Related Home Play

Abstract

The main theme of this article is examining the active role that young English language learners (ELLs) play in making important choices that affect their own language learning and research participation. I will consider the growing emphasis in child Second Language Acquisition (SLA) on the importance of exploring children’s perspectives about their participation in research and English language development as a second language. The first part of this article discusses the new paradigm in child SLA, which takes note of the voices of young children in research rather than overlooks their agency in favor of an adult perspective, while the second part describes an exploratory case study of a 5-year-old Korean-English learner and illustrates how a very young ELL makes decisions as an active research participant in engaging English storybooks as self-access resources in the child’s spontaneous play at home.