Dandan Yang awarded Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship

UCI Graduate Division awarded doctoral candidate Dandan Yang a Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship (GDDF) in support of her doctoral research studying the effectiveness of a digital storybook app design. The fellowship provides $5,000 for summer 2021 dissertation research.
 
Yang’s doctoral research has three components:

1. Design an interactive English storybook app for young children and parents whose first language is Chinese to practice dialogic reading and learn English at home,
2. Conduct a randomized controlled trial to examine whether and to what extent the embedded discussion prompts with immediate feedback facilitate dialogic reading and impact children’s learning, and
3. Examine the verbal and non-verbal parent-child-computer interactions during the shared reading practice and how these interactions are associated with children’s English vocabulary learning and story comprehension outcomes.

​Yang believes her research will contribute to the fields of education, applied linguistics and human computer interaction by shedding light on the design, affordances, user experiences, and educational effectiveness of interactive bilingual storybooks for children and their parents in non-English-speaking countries.

Dandan Yang

​“English storybook apps have the potential to be used as a language resource for children learning English as their second/foreign language,” Yang said. “This cost-effective educational technology may be particularly beneficial for those children from low socio-economic backgrounds. However, there is a dearth of research about how digital storybook apps should be designed to best support this learner population, and it is unclear how parents and children interact with each other and with the device during such bilingual story reading practices. Educators and designers need the information on how these interactions are associated with children’s English language learning outcomes in order to better inform future storybook app design.”
 
Yang is specializing in Teaching, Learning, and Educational Improvement (TLEI) for her doctoral work. Professor Mark Warschauer and Associate Professor Penelope Collins serve as her co-advisors.