Parent Child Interactive Reading During E-Book Reading and Narrative Comprehension

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic has progressed longer than most people have expected, most schoolwork and reading has moved online to digital formats. More people than ever are reading e-books (Good E-Reader, 2020). It is important to see how this is affecting young children and whether reading e-books has similar benefits for children as documented to be associated with reading paper book. One outcome of interest that has been associated with increased experience reading picture books is narrative comprehension. Narrative comprehension is an important outcome of reading experiences as it predicts later literacy acquisition, reading comprehension, and later school success (Griffin et al., 2004; Snow et al., 2001). Research has also suggested that parent-child interaction in the context of paper book reading is critical for promoting oral language as an outcome in this context (Krcmar & Cingel, 2014); though little is known about how much parents are interacting with their children during e-book reading and if these parent-child interactions in this context have the same benefits as the interactions with traditional paper books. The proposed study aims to understand whether parent-child interaction in the context of e-book reading is an important factor for child narrative comprehension. To do this, the study would have investigated how e-books affect parent-child interaction by having children read an e-book alone and with a parent. After reading both e-books, children would have been asked to perform a narrative comprehension task and a recall task. It is predicted that children would have performed better on both tasks when they would have read the e-book with a parent compared to when they would have read it alone. Children would have also been predicted to perform better on both tasks if their parents had scored higher on the ACIRI scale compared to their peers whose parents would have scored lower on the ACIRI scale. Keywords: E-Books, Interactive Reading, Narrative Comprehension, Story Recall, Parent-Child Interaction