Familiarity vs. Pedagogy: How Word- and Content-Learning from Books Differs by Genre

• In Event: 2-148 - Child Talk and Vocabulary Development: Enhancing the Educational Environment of Books and Videos

Integrative Statement

Parents and teachers often cite shared reading as a main vehicle for learning new words and new information (Rideout et al., 2003), but little attention is paid to how different structures of text may impact that learning (Hepburn et al. 2010; Pinkham, 2012). In particular, although we know a great deal about the development of children’s comprehension in different genres of text, how those genres impact word learning or content learning remains an open question.

Although little research has been conducted directly on the role of genre in learning, some research has suggested certain elements that may influence learning. For example, preschool-aged children have been shown to learn more in a pedagogical context than an incidental context (Butler & Markman, 2014), suggesting that the explicit pedagogical cues present in the information genre (e.g. The Big Book of Why) would be ideal for learning. On the other hand, some evidence suggests that young children extract words and facts best from stories when they recognize the structure (Kikuchi, 2014), or are familiar with the story grammar (Alves et al., 2015). Given that narrative texts remain the most common in elementary classrooms (Dreher & Kleitzen, 2016), this would suggest that storybooks (e.g. The Cat in the Hat) may be the most beneficial for learning. Similarly, narrative-information hybrids (e.g. The Magic Schoolbus) may be successful at combining the familiarity of narrative with the realism of expository text; in which case, it may be the ideal situation to learn new words and content.

In the current study we address these competing hypotheses by asking which genre leads to improved learning of both novel vocabulary words and novel information. To that end, we conducted a study in which 88 Kindergarten children were randomly assigned to read either a narrative book (n = 30), an informational book (n = 30), or a hybrid book (n = 28), each about the same novel category. Within each of these texts, 4 novel nouns were incorporated along with 8 pieces of taxonomic information about the basic level category. After children heard the story, we tested them on their learning of the novel words and information.

As shown in figure 1, preliminary results indicate that for word learning, children learned significantly more words from information books than hybrid books, p = .029. Importantly, children hearing the hybrid book did not perform significantly above chance in their word learning (p = .999). Similarly, children learned more information from the information book compared to the narrative book, p = .007.

Taken together, these results suggest that despite the relative unfamiliarity of the information genre, the explicit pedagogy of the text leads to increased vocabulary development and knowledge building. Similarly, although narrative-informational hybrid text are often considered a sub-type of the information genre, they may not be as beneficial to learning as more strictly informational texts. Word learning, in particular, seemed to be negatively impacted by combining the structural elements of each genre.

Author

• Tanya Kaefer, Lakehead University
  Presenting Author