Children’s Reading With Digital Books: Past Moving Quickly to the Future

Abstract

Digital books, such as e-books, story apps, picture book apps, and interactive stories, are narratives presented on touchscreens with multimedia and interactive features. Evidence suggests that early reading of print versus digital books is associated with different patterns of parent-child engagement and children's outcomes. Parents' verbal scaffolding, children's age, and the congruence between a book's narrative and its interactive and multimedia features are three documented process variables that explain the difference between reading print and digital books. To maximize the added value of digital books for children, we need to study the interaction among the characteristics of parents, children, and books; we also need to target these interactions through interventions and through collaborations between designers and researchers.

The impact of mobile application features on children’s language and literacy learning: a systematic review

“…writing, reading, grammar), and the interaction between application features and learner characteristics such as age, language aptitude, language learnt (e.g. Chinese vs. Italian), and L1 vs. L2 learning (Kucirkova, 2019). For instance, the features needed to support vocabulary for a 3-year-old who has not yet learnt to read are likely to differ from those needed for an 11-year-old who is a fluent reader.…”

Growing Up in a Digital World – Digital Media and the Association With the Child’s Language Development at Two Years of Age

“…Book reading for small children generally occurs in a dialog with the child; maintaining child-directed speech, stopping to explain matters the adult decides to explain, or to expand on matters the child questions. Positive effects from picture book reading or e-book reading are often attained through the interactions between the child and the adult ( Kucirkova, 2019 ). It is the interactive aspect of reading that is of utmost importance for linguistic development ( Mol et al, 2008 ).…”

The Distance Between the “Self” and the “Other” in Children’s Digital Books

“…The techno-social (or socio-material) entanglement implies that media can be used to strengthen literacy pedagogy and literacy pedagogy can strengthen digital media; one necessitates the other for securing children's rich learning experiences. The socio-material perspective supports the notion of child-content-context-community interrelationships practices (Kucirkova, 2019), that is the combination of children's characteristics, context of reading, content of the text and the community reading practices, that together shape children's lives. What socio-materiality does not specify, however, are the mechanisms through which the context, content and individual child's characteristics interact for stronger or weaker relations.…”

“…Significant progress has been made in research, with interdisciplinary studies evidencing the complexities of how children's cognitive, emotional, and social outcomes correspond to the use of diverse media in a variety of everyday contexts. Such progress has, we have argued previously (Kucirkova, 2019), been enabled through interdisciplinary, cross-cultural conversations and considerations of the relationships between individual children's learning outcomes, individual characteristics and the design features of media. An area that needs much further development concerns the theoretical advancement of children's use of digital books, and the implications that may be taken from empirical studies to the wider field of children's interactions with technologies and social resources.…”