ABSTRACT

Young children develop understandings about literacy from birth through experiences of print in their home environments. Today, written text is often present in children’s homes in both print and digital forms. What kind of technologies are young children accessing at home and for what purposes? This paper discusses research findings from questionnaires completed by parents about the home digital literacy practices of 105 Turkish children aged 5–7 years and the nature of parental support for digital technology use at home. Parent interviews with five families further identified the technologies used, the children’s repertoire of digital literacy practices and issues confronting parents about children’s use of technology. The study revealed that children were actively engaged in multimodal practices through the use of digital technologies in play and learning in their homes. The main implications of this study are that it is important that educators be aware of children’s existing digital home literacy practices as a foundation for further literacy learning and that parents may need support in understanding how technology use can contribute to children’s literacy learning. Further research is warranted in this area.

摘要

幼儿通过在家庭环境中的印刷体验从出生开始就了解识字。今天，书面文本经常以印刷和数字形式出现在儿童之家形式。幼儿在家中使用什么样的技术以及出于什么目的？本文讨论了父母完成的问卷调查的研究结果，该问卷调查了 105 名 5-7 岁土耳其儿童的家庭数字扫盲实践以及父母支持在家中使用数字技术的性质。对五个家庭的家长访谈进一步确定了所使用的技术、孩子们在数字素养实践方面的全部内容以及家长在孩子使用技术方面面临的问题。该研究表明，儿童通过在家中玩耍和学习中使用数字技术，积极参与多模式实践。这项研究的主要意义在于，教育工作者必须意识到儿童现有的数字家庭识字实践是进一步识字学习的基础，并且父母可能需要支持以了解技术使用如何有助于儿童的识字学习。这方面的进一步研究是必要的。