Reading Response: “Kindergartener’s meaning making with multimodal app books: The relations amongst reader characteristics, app book characteristics, and comprehension outcomes”
Christ, Wang, Chiu, and Cho (2019) observed fifty-three kindergarten children reading different app books and analyzed their reading responses. Their findings showed that reader characteristics and app book characteristics were linked to better comprehension outcomes.
App books are more accessible for young learners as it includes interactive text, illustrations, automatic animations with touch screen (Christ e al., 2019). Here is an example of an app book “A Shiver of Sharks”: http://bit.ly/2nM3Gr8 Children can press a specific word in the book to activate a hotspot to see the movement and the sound of the word, which is a great way to decode a new word.
Hotspots and automatic animations are digital features that provide young learners with interactive word knowledge. Research has showed that children can recall text better when they are in “read and play” mode (Christ et al., 2019). According to Christ et al.,
“Children who scored 10% higher than the mean on listening comprehension for a printed text averaged 3% higher unprompted retelling, 2% higher prompted retelling, and 6% higher depth of vocabulary knowledge scores for target words when reading app books.”
I found it interesting and wanted to find some free app books that I can use in my classroom, but I could not find any free apps. However, here is the link about the app book titles and brief description of characteristics that were used in Christ et al.’s research: http://bit.ly/2Bp7xyY I was able to find all the interactive app books on iPad, but they all cost about $3.99-6.00 per book. Hopefully I can find some free interactive app books in the future. Epic! is the best online reading website/app I have found so far, and it is free for educators!
In addition, Christ et al. (2019) pointed out some limitations of their study. For example, the data collected was only focused on kindergarten kids, and the findings could not be referred to further reading development.
Reference
Christ, T., Wang, X. C., Chiu, M. M., & Cho, H. (2019). Kindergartener’s meaning making with multimodal app books: The relations amongst reader characteristics, app book characteristics, and comprehension outcomes. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 47, 357–372. doi: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2019.01.003
