Mother-Child Shared Reading of Digital Personalized Books at Home

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Digital Texts and Digital Talk: Tracing Online Reading and Writing Practices

Abstract

This paper draws on an empirical investigation of how parents and children share digital personalizable books at home. Digital personalizable books are e-books and apps that can be personalized to an individual child or adult reader with digital photographs, written texts or audio sounds. The study used multimodalanalysis to identify naturally-occurring engagement patterns, including gaze, body posture, movement and gesture. Ethnographic methods such as participant observation, interviews with the parents, field notes, and artifact analysis of children’s and parents’ own digital stories were used to gather rich contextual data. Five UK mothers of children aged between 3-5 years old, participated in the study, Early evidence suggests more positive engagement with visually-based personalization than audio-based personalization.

Authors

• Natalia Kucirkova, University College London

• Rosie Flewitt, University of London