Young Children Reading E-books: How Multimodal Features Matter for Emotional Literacy
Submitted by:
carina hermansson
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to examine emotional aspects of digital literary reading. Whereas the potential of the Ebook to develop children’s literacy skills in terms of phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and reading comprehension has been of increasing interest to scholars (e.g. Lysenko & Abrami, 2014), its potential to develop emotional literacy, as, for example, empathy, has yet to be explored. In this paper, we want to address this lacuna by examining young children’s reading of a narrative text in e-book format. The empirical data is taken from a larger study concerned with understanding the complexity of digital reading practices in early childhood education. The data consists of video documentation, field notes and interviews, collected in a Swedish preschool class one day every other week, from September, 2014, till May, 2015. The 27 six-year-olds and the teacher had access to his/her own digital device.
We argue that the multimodal features of the Ebook create a space for the development of complex emotional processes. Ebook-readers are invited not only to respond to characters’ emotions – represented in written words and in pictures; they are also invited to detect and interpret emotion in – or feel themselves into – the digital read-aloud voice, thus producing increased interactive engagements between reader, text, and digital device. In addition, the collective reading experience (facilitated by the digital read-aloud voice) invites readers to read each other’s emotions as well as alerting them to the existence of other perspectives. This interdependent process, between text, materiality, and individuals, may promote emerging democratic abilities, for example empathy, suggesting that digital literary reading may play an important role in the preschool’s work with democratic values. The theoretical basis of this study is emotional literacy (Steiner and Perry 1997), that is, “the ability to understand ourselves and other people” (Weave 2004: 2). Important concepts are empathy, the ”intimate, feeling-based understanding of another’s inner life” as well as with inanimate things (Currie 2011: 82), and embodiment.
References
Currie, G. (2011). “Empathy for Objects”. In Coplan, A. & Goldie, P. (Eds.) Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford UP, pp. 82-95.
Lysenko, L. V., & Abrami, P. C. (2014). ”Promoting Reading Comprehension with the Use of Technology”. Computers & Education, 75, 162-172.
Steiner, C. & Perry, P. (1997). Achieving Emotional Literacy: A Personal Program to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury
Weare, K. (2004). Developing the Emotionally Literate School, London: SAGE.