How Can Enhanced e-Book Features Facilitate Vocabulary Development and Parent-Child Interactions

Abstract

This theoretical thesis aimed to investigate and review whether and how enhanced features of e-books can be utilized to help facilitate vocabulary learning for young children, in the context of shared book reading. Research on e-books seemed to be mixed in terms of how well they can promote child vocabulary, and whether parent-child interactions in the context of e-book reading is comparable to that in reading printed books. The current review revealed that these questions are complexified by the ways in which enhanced features such as audio, animations, and hotspots/games are utilized in enhanced e-books. Enhanced e-books need to be more carefully designed and focus on story relevancy in order to be properly used for educational purposes. Using enhanced features to focus on entertainment can result in passive reading, and be detrimental to the vocabulary learning development of young preschooler and kindergarten aged children. Not all children learn the same way, so being able to customize enhanced features, such as simply turning them on and off, can help personalize the reading experience to the learning style of the individual reader. Enhanced e-book features, like programmed readers, can also affect how parents engage with e-books when reading with their children. Parents who are unsure on how to interact with their children when reading enhanced e-books may not be able to engage in learning practices like dialogic reading. This is important because parental interaction has been suggested to be incredibly important for their children's vocabulary acquisition. Utilizing enhanced features to teach parents how to engage in dialogic reading can help prompt them to interact more with their children and ask them more complex open-ended questions.