Investigation of the effect of wordless books on children's early literacy and narrative skills and language acquisition

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of wordless picture books on the early literacy, narrative skills, and language acquisition of children aged 58–70 months attending preschool education, as well as to explore preschool teachers' perspectives on this subject. This research was designed as a mixed-method study with a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design. The same data collection tools were applied to the experimental and control groups both before and after the experimental implementation. The study group consisted of 58 children (29 in the experimental group and 29 in the control group) attending an independent kindergarten in the Van province during the 2023–2024 academic year, as well as four teachers working with the children in the experimental group. The data collection tools used in the study included the Teacher Interview Form, the LITMUS (Turkish Sentence Repetition Test), the "Early Literacy Skills Assessment Tool (EOBDA)," and the "Narrative Skills Evaluation Form (ÖADF)." Quantitative data were analyzed using the Independent Samples t-test, Paired Samples t-test, one-way repeated measures ANOVA, Bonferroni test, Friedman test, Mann Whitney-U test, and Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test. Qualitative data were analyzed using content analysis. According to the findings, the posttest results of the experimental group, where the learning environment was enriched with wordless picture books, showed a significant difference in favor of the experimental group compared to the control group, which received no intervention, for the EOBDA, ÖADF, and LITMUS tests. Similarly, a significant difference was observed in favor of the posttest results when comparing the experimental group's pretest and posttest scores for the same tests. The findings indicate that the use of wordless picture books in the educational environment contributes to children's early literacy, narrative skills, and language development. The post-implementation views of teachers working with the experimental group also support these findings.