Scaffolded Participatory and Collaborative Learning: Enhancing Children Reading with E-book Readers

Abstract

Recently, many forms of e-book readers such as iPad and Kindles are becoming widely-spread. However, simply adopting e-books readers does not necessarily guarantee the improvement of reading process. Educators advocate that learning to read should not be a solitary activity. Instead, it should be a participatory learning activity that engages learners in active reading process. However, due to the less experience in reading, children at the learning-to-read stage need a different set of tools and scaffolds to involve in participatory reading activities than such annotation or tagging systems developed for adults. In this vein, this study proposes a scaffolded participatory reading model addresses the role of e-book readers in strengthen the relationship between reading strategies, child-parent collaboration, and experience sharing in communities. A participatory reading activity was designed based on the model. This study found that tablet-based e-book readers can facilitate child-parent collaboration and afford variety forms of interactions. In particular, the storytelling activity on such tablets helped the parents provide different guidance including dialogic reading strategies and those related to story structure, helping the children to reflect on the book read. The result of this study also suggests that a persistent platform that can record and demonstrate the reading experience is a critical element to facilitate participatory reading among children Educators may find it useful to apply such approach in other reading context.