Children's Reading Experiences Research Articles

Parental Involvement in Reading Among Grade 1 Learners

Parental involvement in reading is crucial for learners. Active engagement helps develop early reading skills, boost self-esteem, and improve parent-child relationships that may grow their children's reading experiences by having frequent storytelling sessions, having book discussions, and setting up a family that values literacy. This study determined the nature of parental involvement in reading among Grade 1 learners in the three identified public elementary schools in Cebu, Philippines. The instruments used in the study included a researcher-made questionnaire administered to 174 parents. Quantitative data from the questionnaire were analyzed using statistical measures such as frequency, simple percentage, weighted mean, and the Chi-square test of independence. It was concluded that although parents were somewhat involved, parents were more active in learning at home. The parental involvement was often modest. The same empirical findings showed no correlation between the respondents' diversified profiles and parental reading engagement with Grade 1 learners. Aware of the results, the researchers politely suggested using the action plans explicitly created to help parents involve their children in reading.

Augmented reality books: in-depth insights into children's reading engagement.

Children's reading engagement is associated with the quality of their reading experiences and outcomes; however, research to date has only examined children's reading engagement within the context of traditional print books or digital texts. Augmented Reality represents a hybrid reading experience, where traditional paper books are augmented with digital features (e.g., animations, sounds, comprehension questions). This is the first study to examine children's perspectives and experiences of AR books, within the context of reading engagement. In total, 38 demographically diverse children (aged 8-10, 21 male, 17 English as an Additional Language, 14 ethnicities, nine with teacher-reported reading difficulties) from the UK participated. After reading an AR book, children participated in interviews about their reading engagement. Deductive (themes) and inductive (subthemes) approaches to thematic analysis were used, examining children's AR reading experiences within the context of their behavioral, cognitive, affective and social engagement. The majority of children found AR books easy to use, and provided examples of how AR books supported their behavioral engagement (e.g., desire to read more/extend reading practices), altered their cognitive engagement (e.g., reading strategies, visual representation/use of imagination, comprehension monitoring), influenced their affective engagement: (e.g., diverse positive feelings), and social engagement (e.g., prompted interaction and discussion), providing examples suggesting similarities and differences with traditional print books. This paper provides novel in-depth insights into children's perspectives and experiences of AR books, and provides a foundation for researchers, educators, and AR book designers interested in better supporting children's reading experiences and outcomes with AR books.

Intertekstualni dijalozi u funkciji negovanja čitalačkog iskustva najmlađih

The paper shows a selection of literary texts for children, made with a qualitative analysis of a wider corpus of texts, and in accordance with the criteria of intertextual connection. The goal was to explore the possible ways in which the children's reading experience can be directed and nurtured with the selection of texts that are in mutual intertextual dialogue. The analysis resulted in a list of texts that can be used for the investigative project reading and development of the reading experience. Three internationally known fairy tales, two fables and three corpuses of traditional fairy tales in which a certain protagonist or antagonist appear were selected as reference texts. A large amount of prose and poetic texts that are in intertextual dialogue with them was registered. The inspection of the obtained results gave us the possible methodological directions for inclusion of these texts into the educational process, as well as specific guidelines for the processing of a narrow selection of texts.

Doprinos strategije čitanje sa ispitivanjem horizonta očekivanja na ranom uzrastu - jedan projekat

Reader strategy of exploring the horizon of expectations plays a significant role in the literary world as well as in the reader's consciousness, as it encourages their engagement in interpreting the text and actively following the literary work. Textual actualization contributes to the creation of certain assumptions and later expectations, which can evoke psychological reactions in the reader. For the purposes of research, a project was implemented in an educational group of children aged 3 and 4 in a preschool institution in Belgrade. The conducted research was based on the Foundations of Preschool Education Program, focusing on the project-based approach to learning with the stimulation of exploring the horizon of expectations. The project revolves around three literary texts by Roger Hargreaves from the Mr Men series (Mr Greedy, Mr Nosey and Mr Grumpy), which contain questions for exploring the horizon of expectations within their narrative. The aim of the project is to examine children's reading experience and the verbalization of expectations and conclusions based on explicit and implicit information in the text at specific moments. Based on the obtained results, the level of development of children's modest reading experience was determined.

Лексика эмоций в житиях святых для детей: функциональный аспект

The article is devoted to the problem of linguistic originality of hagiographic texts for children regarded as a special branch of hagiographic genre, which communicates to the new generation culturally significant senses and values of the ethnic group, with the emphasis on the concept of a religious and moral ideal. The source of the language material was collections of hagiographies for children. The author focuses on lexical units that nominate and describe emotional experiences. The features determining the use of units of this lexical set for the creation of texts that consider children's reading experience are established. It is shown that the specificity of using the vocabulary of emotions in a hagiographic text is determined by its functional load: its usage as a means of characterization (characterological function), the basics of compositional text formation (text-building function), the implementation of the educational orientation of the hagiographic text (didactic function). The vocabulary of emotions is an important means of creating imagery based on metaphorical and metonymic shifts, which contributes to the adaptation of the text to the age and cultural demands of the children's readership. The consideration of functional and stylistic originality of lexemes, their heterogeneity, mixing of bookish and colloquial words has enabled the author to trace transformation processes in hagiographic genre, which are characteristic of modern hagiographic texts.

We read, we write: reconsidering reading–writing relationships in primary school children

AbstractThe extent to which children's reading experiences influence their writing production is not well understood. It is imperative that the connections between these literacy practices are elucidated in order to inform the development of stimulating curricula and to support children's development. This paper presents new data and key findings from a project investigating relationships between children's free choice reading and volitional writing in Key Stage 2 (9–10 years). The data were collected in two primary schools in northern England, using mixed methods. Quantitative data were collected using an online reading survey taken by 170 children, and qualitative data were provided through independent writing journals maintained by 38 participants. Through analysis of the data using a multiliteracies approach, we demonstrate that the writing that children choose to do is influenced by the texts they encounter as readers in terms of content, text type and linguistic style. The child readers in this project encountered texts in different media and created texts in a range of genres. By examining a sample of children's written texts from the data set, we show that children's interactions and transactions with texts as readers and writers are complex and multiple. Children creatively work across media, and in doing so the boundaries of traditional text genres and styles are redeveloped and redesigned. These findings highlight the importance of providing children with opportunities to freely choose and create texts and recognising the wide variety of text experiences that children bring to their classroom learning.

Growing up a reader: Exploring children’s and adolescents’ perceptions of ‘a reader’

ABSTRACTBackground: Over the last two decades, the reading habits of children and adolescents have evolved. Research shows some similarities in the reading experiences of children and adolescents, but there are also differences. For example, adolescents are more likely to read digitally and generally report poorer attitudes towards reading. With this in mind, we asked: how do young people define a reader?Purpose: This small scale, in-depth study sought to understand how children and adolescents describe ‘a reader’ and examine similarities and differences in their responses.Methods: In total, 33 children aged 9–11 and 30 adolescents aged 15–16 from one primary school to one secondary school in the UK were individually interviewed, to explore their perceptions and descriptions of a reader. Using a participatory approach, adult researchers interviewed student researchers, who then in turn interviewed their peers. Transcribed data were analysed qualitatively, using a data-driven, inductive thematic analysis approach.Results: Our analysis revealed some common themes in terms of children and adolescents’ perceptions of a reader. For example, readers were described as those who enjoy reading, read frequently, choose to read and, primarily, read print books. Readers were also described as those who are skilled at reading. However, subtle differences between children and adolescents were also found. For example, adolescents were more likely to say that readers choose a broader range of reading matter and did not need to read as frequently to be described a reader.Conclusions and implications: Our analysis offers insights into how children and adolescents defined a reader. Understanding more about how children and young people describe readers may help teachers who are working towards strengthening reading cultures in their primary or secondary school contexts. Broadening the conceptualisation of what it means to be a reader could arguably lead to a more inclusive use of the term and ultimately encourage more children and adolescents to self-identify as readers. Further, from a methodological point of view, we encourage researchers to consider a participatory research approach where appropriate, as this involvement in the research process can support primary and secondary school students in the development of their own research skills.

Interaction Designing Research for Children's eBooks

Book is not only a teacher on the way of children's development, but also a gate of learning knowledge. Essentially, good books play a significant role on the development of children's character and intellectual forming process. In the age of the Internet, mobile devices as a new carrier of literature, with its unique text, sound, images, video and other diversified forms involved in the creation and propagation of children's books, it has brought the development of eBooks more variability at the same time also a revolution for children's reading experience. This paper will combine the characteristics and problems of existing children's eBooks, analyzing the interactive design of children's eBooks.

Children's responses to the interactivity of storybook apps in family shared reading events involving the iPad

AbstractThis paper reports on some data on the effects of screen‐based interactivity on children's engagement with storybook apps during family shared book reading that were gathered in a 2‐year, small‐scale ethnographic case study in Spain. Data analysis focuses on the complex interplay between the storybook app's interactive features and the children's responses to them. Our findings show that interactive elements increase the child's autonomy, as they tend to promote the importance of the reader, positioning him or her as a collaborator, storyteller, an author or an internal character in the fiction; something that can materialise in exciting narrative strategies that can trigger powerful responses to digital literary texts in emergent readers, including playing, creating new fictions or engaging emotionally with the story. Finally, we argue that the Reader Response models that have been used over recent decades to understand children's reading experiences with storybooks need to be revised to better understand their current experiences with interactive texts.

Neural competition as a developmental process: Early hemispheric specialization for word processing delays specialization for face processing

Little is known about the impact of learning to read on early neural development for word processing and its collateral effects on neural development in non-word domains. Here, we examined the effect of early exposure to reading on neural responses to both word and face processing in preschool children with the use of the Event Related Potential (ERP) methodology. We specifically linked children's reading experience (indexed by their sight vocabulary) to two major neural markers: the amplitude differences between the left and right N170 on the bilateral posterior scalp sites and the hemispheric spectrum power differences in the γ band on the same scalp sites. The results showed that the left-lateralization of both the word N170 and the spectrum power in the γ band were significantly positively related to vocabulary. In contrast, vocabulary and the word left-lateralization both had a strong negative direct effect on the face right-lateralization. Also, vocabulary negatively correlated with the right-lateralized face spectrum power in the γ band even after the effects of age and the word spectrum power were partialled out. The present study provides direct evidence regarding the role of reading experience in the neural specialization of word and face processing above and beyond the effect of maturation. The present findings taken together suggest that the neural development of visual word processing competes with that of face processing before the process of neural specialization has been consolidated.

A whole new world: Discovering a story sack

Enhance the reading experience for children by creating your very own story sack, writes Charlotte Baker.

Toward a History of Children as Readers, 1890–1930

In 1930 Journal of Social Hygiene published results of a survey of recreational interests of 1,600 girls in Brooklyn. Their favorite recreational activity was reading, which was then followed by swimming, then making dresses, going to movies, playing tennis, dancing, and riding in automobiles.1 A presentation at 19 14 New York Child Welfare exhibit on hobbies of boys found that majority of 933 boys surveyed gave reading as their favorite hobby as well.2 Reading thus topped lists of both boys and girls as their favorite pastime, and yet we know very little about historical reading experience of children. This is an especially glaring omission when we consider that time period from 1890 to 1930 saw establishment of children's publishing, children's librarianship, and dawn of the century of child.3 There are very few histories of reading that include evidence of child readers. Historical readers of all ages are notoriously difficult to study because evidence of their interactions with texts is ephemeral and often absent from historical record. There has been some scholarship that scrutinizes individual children's diaries, focusing on their reading or including evidence of their reading as one aspect of their path from childhood to adulthood.4 Only a handful of studies have attempted to analyze children's reading activities as connected to but also distinct from those of adults.5 There are studies of readers organized by class that include young people, defined as children both legally and culturally, but intertwine children's reading experiences with those of adults.6 This intertwining is appropriate when analyz-

Story and illustration reconstituted: Children's literature in Canadian reading programs

This study addresses the differences between literature in children's trade books and the literature in commercial elementary language arts reading programs used in Canada. Although the nature of the literature included in language arts programs has received considerable scrutiny in the United States, there is no parallel body of research in the Canadian context. Using a textual content analysis, all the literature selections contained in the three most extensively used reading programs in Canada were where possible compared with the corresponding trade books. Numerous differences between trade book literature and the corresponding selections in the reading programs suggest that the two are not equivalent in the reading experiences they provide for children. The changes included alterations to format such as omissions, additions, substitutions, and reordering of text and illustrations. Many of the original selections reconstituted in the reading programs were impoverished by the changes. Further research is needed on how these changes alter children's reading experiences.

Inferring sublexical correspondences from sight vocabulary: evidence from 6- and 7-year-olds.

We report an experiment designed to investigate 6-to-7-year-old children's ability to acquire knowledge of sublexical correspondences between print and sound from their reading experience. A computer database containing the printed word vocabulary of children taking part in the experiment was compiled and used to devise stimuli controlled for grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) frequency and rime neighbourhood consistency according to the children's reading experience. Knowledge of GPC rules and rime units was compared by asking children to read aloud three types of nonword varying in regularity of GPC and consistency of rime pronunciation. Results supported the view that children can acquire knowledge of both GPC rules and rime units from their reading experience. GPC rule strength affects the likelihood of a GPC response; rime consistency affects the likelihood of a rime response.

Expository and Narrative Text:Balancing Young Children's Reading Experiences

(1991). Expository and Narrative Text: Balancing Young Children's Reading Experiences. Childhood Education: Vol. 67, No. 4, pp. 211-214.

Young children's conceptual factors of reading

The purpose of this study was to examine young children's understanding of the reading process. The subjects were 60 children whose ages ranged from three to five. The students were administered an open‐ended interview to obtain their conceptions of reading. Using content analysis, their responses were categorized and frequency distributions were tallied. Since there was an unequal number of responses for each category, percentages for each category were computed using the total number of responses rather than the number of respondents. The results indicated that young children's immediate experiences had an impact on their conceptions of reading. Most of the young children's reading experiences consisted of reading pictures and listening to stories. Since most young children are not able to read, others read for them. The reading areas are also part of the child's experiences. Most of their reading experiences are in school, home and community.

Building a Bridge to English Literacy in Aboriginal Bilingual Education Programs

The aim of bilingual education is to develop a person who can think, speak, read, write and act appropriately in the language and culture of both his home and the wider society. Therefore, although for sound educational reasons the first formal reading experiences of children in a bilingual program are provided in their mother-tongue and these activities are maintained and extended throughout the child’s school life, at an appropriate time a bridge to English literacy needs to be built. Once this is done the world of English literature should be explored as far as is possible for each individual child. Sarah Gudschinsky stresses the importance of the addition of English literacy skills for pre-literate groups within a wider society when she reminds us that people who are deprived of this opportunity will find it difficult to take their rightful place in modern society. (1973, p.138)She has defined a literate person as one who in language that he speaks, can read and understand anything he could have understood if it had been spoken to him and can write, so that it can be read, anything that he can say. (1973, p.5)

Cognitive Scanning Processes in Children

Third- and fifth-grade children and adults were presented with 8-item letter sequences of varied approximations to English in a tachistoscopic single report, cue delay task. Age differences in report accuracy suggested that younger children, as compared with adults, may be at a double disadvantage in tasks requiring perceptual-memory processing: Their initial intake capacity and/or selective processing abilities may be more limited than those of adults; and the subsequent strategy employed by children to transfer iconic information into a more permanent memory store appears to be qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, different (less systematic, less orderly, and less efficient) than that used by adults. The suggestion that children's reading experience and ability (as assessed by a word recognition task) may be related to their systematic use of an orderly left-to-right iconic transfer strategy was also examined. In addition, the results suggested that the differential letter-pattern familiarity effect between children and adults may not be attributable to visual intake components but, rather, may be related to the relative rates with which familiar letter patterns are transferred out of iconic memory.