Can e-books foster child language? Meta-analysis on the effectiveness of e-book interventions in early childhood education and care

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2022.100472Get rights and content

Highlights

  • E-book interventions in ECEC have the potential to foster language development.

  • Number of story repetitions and number of sessions matter in e-book interventions.

  • Embedding e-book reading in related classroom activities yields increased effects.

Abstract

Language abilities in the early years are a strong predictor of children's success in school. However, a considerable number of children enter school with poor language skills. Therefore, one of the most important but also challenging mandates of early childhood education and care [ECEC] is to promote these skills before school enrolment. Meta-analytic evidence suggests that shared book reading is a valuable tool to narrow this gap in the early years. In the digital age, e-books might offer new opportunities to foster language development in ECEC. This meta-analysis investigates the effectiveness of e-book interventions in comparison to regular childcare and to shared print book reading in classrooms. The systematic search, examining studies from 2000 to 2018, was carried out by two independent reviewers. A random-effect model was used to aggregate findings. Altogether, 17 studies with 30 different e-book treatments were included. Children benefited significantly more from the e-book interventions compared to regular childcare (g = 0.85). Activities with e-books were also ahead of print storybook reading in ECEC (g = 0.45). The effectiveness was mainly moderated by story repetition, number of sessions, and embeddedness in the classroom. E-books were primarily researcher-developed and included congruent functions to foster language development. Implications for practice, research and app development are discussed.

Introduction

Research shows that language skills in the early years – in particular competencies in the language spoken at school and in society – have long-lasting impact on children's success in school and later life (Burchinal, Pace, Alper, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2016; Burchinal, Peisner-Feinberg, Pianta, & Howes, 2002). More specifically, good oral language and narrative skills predict academic skills, e.g. literacy, reading (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Nonetheless, a considerable number of children around the globe still enter school with poor language skills (Brooks-Gunn, Rouse, & McLanahan, 2007; Save the Children Fund, 2015). In particular, children growing up in families with low socio-economic status/poverty or in homes where the language spoken in the society is not present have a higher risk to lag behind their peers in their language development (Hoff, 2003; Hoff & Core, 2013; Pace, Luo, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2017). The weaker language skills of at-risk children often reflect their more limited experience with the ambient languge (lower input quantity and quality). Their first systematic exposure to the ambient language as well as to academic language is often when they enter preschool or kindergarten (Hoff & Core, 2013). Ensuring access to high-quality childcare services is the most effective and efficient way to reduce inequities (OECD, 2020). On that note, ECEC has become a policy priority in the G20 agenda for sustainable development (Urban, Cardini, Guevara, Okengo, & Romero, 2019). As a consequence, a central mandate of ECEC (established in governmental early learning frameworks) is to foster language development as a key domain of school readiness and to provide compensatory interventions to at-risk children.

Storybook reading provides an opportunity to help alleviate developmental risks of poor language skills and low SES, because stimulating material is paired with enriched language input in engaging teacher-child interactions. Scaffolding children's language and cognitive skills in this manner has proved effective. Being read to more in early childhood has been linked to larger vocabularies and higher reading scores later (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002). Meta-analytic evidence corroborates that shared book reading and dialogic reading can improve oral language skills (Mol, Bus, De Jong, & Smeets, 2008; Noble et al., 2019; What Works Clearinghouse, 2007; 2015). What matters are reading style and potentially the number of story repetitions (Flack, Field, & Horst, 2018).

In dialogic or shared book reading styles, children are engaged in a conversation about the story content and related elaborations by adult prompts that encourage, expand, and extend children's utterances (Whitehurst et al., 1994). This method enhances language skills of children from various backgrounds (Valdez-Menchaca & Whitehurst, 1992; Whitehurst et al., 1994). Mol et al. (2008) found a moderate effect of dialogic reading (d = 0.42) compared to reading with more passive children with larger effect sizes for expressive than for receptive vocabulary and normally-developing rather than at-risk children. Sénéchal (1997) showed that interactive book-reading was efficient for expressive vocabulary growth, whereas repeated storybook exposure improved both receptive and expressive vocabulary. Noble et al. (2019) on the other hand revealed only a small effect (g = 0.23) of shared book reading (any type, not just dialogic reading), which became negligible when control groups were active1 as well.

Horst, Parsons, and Bryan (2011) corroborate the idea that repeated exposure to the same story is the decisive factor for the acquisition of new vocabulary. Three-year-olds showed higher scores on new vocabulary after being exposed to new words repeatedly in the same rather than several different stories. Listening to the same audio story repeatedly has been linked to improvements in children's sentence completion ability and word memory (Niebuhr-Siebert & Ritterfeld, 2012). The potential of audio input might be the higher degree of standardization compared to print storybook reading or naturalistic settings, because voice, intonation, pronunciation, pitch, rhythm etc. remain constant. Repeated exposure seems to enhance learning from storybooks, even if merely presented acoustically, and maybe more so, if supported by visualizations.

Even though there is a growing body of evidence, children spend only five percent of their time in center-based childcare in book reading activities (Early et al., 2005). On average, less than two book reading activities are offered per day. Approximately half of them (49.7%) are interactive including teacher-child dialogs. Only a limited number of children (mean = 6.26) in the classroom get to participate in those activities (Wirts, Egert, & Reber, 2017). These findings indicate that despite the positive potential effects of book reading activities, only few children experience them frequently.

The high availability and prevalence of digital media (Pew Research Center, 2019) may thus bear new potential for improving children's language skills and enhancing later school success. Identifying multimedia tools suitable for fostering language skills, especially for children at risk, has long been a political aim in many countries, not least of the Ready to Learn Initiative in the US. For more than two decades digital storybooks have presented center-based care with new opportunities to foster children's language development (Zucker, Moody, & McKenna, 2009). However, there is neither a clear orthography rule of the term ‘electronic book’ (e.g., e-book, ebook, digital book, digital/multimedia storybook) nor a precise definition. Following and extending Kozminsky and Asher-Sadon (2013, p. 234), we understand an e-book to be a “book-length digital form publication” consisting of an audio rendition of a story from the “narrative or informational genre” (Zucker et al., 2009, p. 50) and including static or animated pictures. Optionally, the story's written text as well as further multimedia or interactive features (e.g., text tracking, music, sounds, page-turning, hotspots, games, dictionaries) are present. The e-book is accessible on a digital device (e.g., computer, electronic reader, tablet, smartphone).

Takacs, Swart, and Bus (2014) raised the question whether the computer can replace the adult in storybook reading and, indeed, found that e-books were equally effective as print book reading. In another meta-analysis, Takacs, Swart, and Bus (2015) investigated technology-enhanced book reading in preschool and primary school children in various settings. Control groups listened to the same story in what the authors refer to as more traditional settings (e.g., audio book, story read to child by adult). Technology-enhanced e-book reading revealed small effects for story comprehension (g = 0.17) and expressive (but not receptive) vocabulary (g = 0.20) over controls. A recent research synthesis (Reich, Yau, & Warschauer, 2016) summarizes that reading well-designed e-books can lead to equivalent or higher comprehension and vocabulary scores than print book reading in children older than 3 at home or in ECEC.

Several studies report that at-risk children profit substantially from e-book reading (Korat, 2009; Shamir, Korat, & Fellah, 2012; Verhallen & Bus, 2010). The meta-analysis from Takacs et al. (2014) indicated that disadvantaged (due to environmental/familial factors or developmental delays) and non-disadvantaged children benefited equally from e-book reading activities on language and literacy scores. In fact, when focusing on e-books with multimedia functions, at-risk children's story comprehension improved more than that of non-disadvantaged children (g=0.28 vs. 0.66).

Story comprehension and word learning might be scaffolded by congruent multimedia elements in e-books, e.g., moving pictures linked closely to the narration, similarly to adults' support during shared reading (Takacs et al., 2014). In contrast, interactive features (e.g., hotspots, games) inevitably attract children's attention and thus impede learning, even more so in at-risk children (Takacs et al., 2014). Many preschool-age children cannot re-direct their attention to the story content effortlessly after distractions (e.g., caused by interactive features that can be accessed during the oral narration). This might be why interactive features induce negative effects on outcome measures (Cordes, Egert, & Hartig, 2020). It thus seems that well-chosen multimedia functions might scaffold children's language learning by directing children's attention to relevant and helpful visualizations contingent to oral presentation of the story, thus allowing multimodal processing of the plot.

Section snippets

Focus of this study

Supporting children's language development is one of the fundamental educational goals of center-based care in the preschool years. In order to collect findings that may pave the way for a more evidence-based practice and more data-driven policy decisions, the present study investigates the role of e-books for language support in early education. Moreover, previous reviews and meta-analyses either date back a number of years and are therefore unable to capture more recent developments in e-book

Method

We included all experimental studies that evaluated the impact of e-book interventions on language development in ECEC settings and met our inclusion criteria as well as What Works Clearinghouse (2020). We formed two separate datasets to answer our questions and to explore possible effect modifiers. Due to the high ECEC enrolment rates of preschool and kindergarten-age children (OECD average is 87.1% and 93.1% respectively; OECD, 2022), an actual passive control group is not available for this

Results

Study characteristics and methodological features of the included 17 studies with 30 treatments are summarized in Table 1. All studies were published in international journals and met the WWC Group Design Standards (2020) with regards to randomization and baseline equivalence. The majority of studies came from Israel (n = 7), others were conducted in US (n = 4), Turkey (n = 3), the Netherlands, Canada or Jordan (n = 1). Results from 20 e-book interventions were contrasted with a business-as

Discussion

Our meta-analytic review of experimental findings clearly indicates that e-book interventions in ECEC classrooms can foster language development in young children.

The plain effect of e-book interventions in comparison to regular childcare is medium-to-large (Cohen, 1988). The magnitude of the reported language composite effects in childcare settings exceeds effect sizes from meta-analyses on shared book reading (Mol et al., 2008; Noble et al., 2019) and technology-enhanced book reading (Takacs

Author statement

Franziska Egert: Funding acquisition; Conceptualization; Formal analysis; Methodology, Supervision; Writing - original draft, review & editing.

Anne-Kristin Cordes: Conceptualization, Formal analysis; Investigation, Validation, Writing - original draft, review & editing.

Fabienne Hartig: Project administration; Investigation, Data curation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, review & editing.

Funding

The meta-analysis was undertaken at ifp Bayern as a part of the initiative ‘Strengthening Digital Competencies in Early Childhood Education’ (Medienkompetenz in der Frühpädagogik stärken). The project was supported by a grant from the Bavarian State Ministry for Families, Labor, and Social Affairs (StMAS)(V4/6513.05-1/477).

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all authors who provided additional information or unpublished data. We also thank Verena Dittl who supported us during coding.

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