Happy New Year everyone! This month the post is written by Professor Natalia Kucirkova of The Open University
Good books enable us to better understand others as well as ourselves. Children’s books are the first encounter young readers have in establishing this understanding. Authors use various techniques to engage children in the story-plot and draw them into a fictional story world. Unlike in fiction books for adults, in children’s books, it is both the illustrations and text that influence children’s learning and enjoyment of a story. A technique that engages children in the story but that is not yet fully researched for its learning potential, is personalization. In my projects, I have been exploring the learning value of children’s personalized stories.
Personalized stories and parent-child difference
In our recent study (Bruheim Jensen, Studsrød & Kucirkova, 2021) with eleven Norwegian families reading personalized books at home, we noticed some differences between children’s and parents’ focus during reading of personalized books. The books the families read together were customized to the individual children with the main story character carrying the child’s name and looking similar to the child in terms of hair and eye colour. The story plot was about the key story character travelling to Alaska and meeting a bear, who later became the children’s best friend and experienced an adventure with them in the mountains. The parents reported that their children were very enthusiastic about seeing themselves in the book and excited to have an unusual character (a bear) as their friend. The adults, on the other hand, were most interested in the learning quality of the story – were the words and story plot good enough to expand their children’s language? While they liked their child being reflected in the story, they commented on the unlikelihood of their child travelling to Alaska. The parents seemed to have preferred to have the story placed in Norway. The findings made us wonder how many elements would need to be personalized and made specifically about the child for parents to engage with a story as much as the children. The study made us think about the importance of parents in bridging children’s understanding of self and others in personalized stories through abstraction.
The importance of abstract talk in reading
Parents play a crucial role in bridging children’s understanding of self and others. Young children tend to think in concrete terms focusing on the immediate images and text of the book, but adults can engage them in abstract thinking. When children share a book together with their parents, the parents can lift the conversation to an abstract level. Indeed, one of the most beneficial features of parents’ talk during reading is the level of abstractness in their speech. Researchers therefore often explore whether the parents ask the child concrete questions like ‘what is happening in the story’, or more abstract questions like ‘why is this happening in the story’? The more parents engage the child’s thinking on an abstract level, the more likely they are to help with the child’s language learning. In research we call it ‘inferencing’ and it occurs when adults connect the book’s content to the world outside the world. Parents can boost children’s understanding of self and others by making a reference to “possible worlds” or imagined places. Such abstract talk takes the child out of their current thinking about what is on the page to what could be on the page. For example parents can ask, ‘why is this character unhappy?’ or ‘do you think bathing in the lake is a good idea, why do you think so?’
Exploring abstract talk in personalized books
In a project funded by ESRC and focused on digital personalized books, we explored the extent to which parents needed to to draw children out to get them to talk more abstractly. In a study with twenty-six British mothers and their three-to-four-year-old children, we analysed both mothers’ and children’s speech that they produced during the reading of the digital books personalized to the child. We found that the children engaged mostly in concrete, self-focused talk using first-person pronouns such as me, I and my. Their mothers, on the other hand, talked mostly about other story characters. Their talk was characterised by some abstraction (inference), but this occurred only as often as talk focused on immediate identification of key characters and happenings in the book. These insights show that personalized books, where the child is the main story character, might not be the best way to support abstract speech during children’s reading, neither for the child nor for the parent reading with them.
Abstraction through interactivity
Another technique that is popular in children’s contemporary reading and that I explored in my follow-up studies, is interactivity. In children’s digital books, interactivity can be a place in a book that the child needs to touch for a story to progress or interactive music. In fictional interactive books, children are provided with the information about the unknown story characters and clues about the characters’ experiences and the world they inhabit. Readers have to imagine the world in their own minds, using their imagination and actively engaging their existing knowledge and schema. In visual representation of stories, such as films, video games and virtual reality, there is less of this active imagination happening than with pure text. This is because multimedia representations do not give clues but directly provide images and sounds. The trend in multimedia development is to increase the input from the producer and reduce the imagination work of the spectator. In the so-called hyper-reality and 5D experiences, which engage all five senses, including smell and touch, spectators have minimal space to bring in their own imagination. They become owned by the story representation that is served to them and are positioned as a more passive than active meaning-maker. This is not beneficial for children’s abstract thinking.
In my current project, I therefore explore how stories that engage children’s visual, haptic and olfactory senses, connect to their abstract thinking. Together with colleagues at the University of Stavanger, we are currently prototyping books that are easy to touch and that emit various scents to engage children at specific points in the story. Whether the presence of scents and getting a concrete sensory clue prompts more or less of abstract talk among the children, is an open question we will explore in the next three years.
References
Bruheim Jensen, I. B., Studsrød, I.m & Kucirkova, N. (2021) Høytlesning av personaliserte bøker for førskolebarn: Foreldres barneperspektiver og opplevelser. Barn.
Kucirkova, N., Gattis, M., Spargo, T. P., de Vega, B. S., & Flewitt, R. (2021). An empirical investigation of parent-child shared reading of digital personalized books. International Journal of Educational Research, 105, 101710.