Parent-child joint reading of digital books in bilingual families in Malta

Charles L Mifsud,Rositsa Georgieva,Natalia Kucirkova

doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2021.101844

Charles L Mifsud, Rositsa Georgieva + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2021.101844

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Abstract

We examined parent-child shared reading of Maltese and English e-books in four bilingual families. Analysis of the participant videos, questionnaires and semi-structured interview data revealed positive engagement of the participating families, substantiated with three main themes from the participants’ interview accounts: balanced use of e-books and print books, the importance of nurturing child's independence with e-book use, and the unique value of e-books for child's learning, especially in terms of repetition. A theoretically-driven analysis of the video data placed the e-books’ affordances in relation to six facets of children's individual engagement (personalized, sustained, shared, creative, affective and interactive), but it needed to be expanded with four additional facets of parent-child joint engagement (didactic, dialogical, self-directed and experiential).

Highlights

Sharing books with children is a very effective context for children’s early learning: parent-child storybook reading predicts children’s emergent literacy, and later achievement in school (e.g., Flack and Horst 2018)
Theme 1: Balanced use of print and digital books The families were clear that the digital books are there not to replace print books but rather to be integrated into their existing reading routines
The thematic analysis found that digital books were perceived as a suitable supplement for children’s reading with parents at home

Summary

Introduction

Sharing books with children is a very effective context for children’s early learning: parent-child storybook reading predicts children’s emergent literacy, and later achievement in school (e.g., Flack and Horst 2018). Shared reading supports children’s focused and joint attention, working and long-term memory, children’s knowledge base about the world and is a unique opportunity for social bonding between parents and children (e.g. Ezell & Justice, 2005; Chaparro-Moreno, Reali & Maldonado-Carreno, 2017) Given these well-documented benefits of shared reading with print books, it is reasonable to ask whether the positive effects continue with digital books ( known as e-books). Digital books, unlike print books, provide access to spoken and written words in multiple languages, which supports children’s language development, especially for minority-language children (Smeets & Bus, 2015; Korat, Atishkin, & Segal-Drori, 2021) Despite these benefits, kindergarten (Undheim & Jernes 2020) and early primary school teachers (Wang, Christ, and Mifsud 2020) report to receive little professional support to guide children’s use of digital (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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