Category Archives: Interactive media

The advantages and disadvantages of digital books to children’s emergent literacy.

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Assignment type: Essay
Author: Lawrence Taylor
Submitted: November 2019

The UK public and schools are spending millions of pounds on digital books every year. Touch screen devices and reading apps that host digital books might have been adopted by families without the parents necessarily considering the functional efficacy. This is potentially detrimental to children’s development of emergent literacy; especially considering that children who are in this stage are more vulnerable to possible negative features of digital books, compared to children who are proficient readers. Shared reading of digital books within parent-child dyads, has shown associations with: greater story content being recalled by children, increased operational and vocabulary-related discourse, but reduced dialogic reading when compared to print books. Some digital books now come with an array of multimedia and interactive features with varying effects on emergent literacy. The review of the literature highlighted that multimedia features that are congruent to the story carried additive benefits for children compared to digital books more broadly. Interactive features, however, are not currently associated with any benefits so should be excluded from digital books designed to foster emergent literacy. Due to the attention and engagement interactive features can afford, future research should aim to find beneficial interactive features.

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Can Interactive Media Replace the Parent as the ‘More Knowledgeable Other’ in Early Language Development?

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Assignment type: Essay
Author: Kirsty Russell
Submitted: November 2018

Society is currently living in a screen age. Interactive media devices are increasingly being used by young children, often independently, without the presence of a parent. Parental reasons for this focus on educational, entertainment and babysitting purposes. Building on behaviourist and socio-constructivist understandings of young children’s language development, this is problematic for two important reasons. Firstly, it reduces the amount of parental linguistic input that a child receives in their early years, that is essential for language development. Secondly, features of parent-child interactions that drive language development cannot be replicated by interactive media use when children are alone (including scaffolding techniques, promoting joint attention, providing gestural clues and providing a familiar voice). Ultimately, interactive media cannot replace the parent as the More Knowledgeable Other in young children’s language development. Parents need to apply what is known about language development and be aware of their important role as the More Knowledgeable Other in interactive learning experiences before it is too late. Parents should engage in learning activities that revolve around parent-child interactions, before passing the responsibility of children’s language learning to interactive media becomes normalised. Implications for Educational Psychology practice and potential areas for further research are also discussed.

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