Search

This paper reports on some data on the effects of screen-based interactivity on children's engagement with storybook apps during family shared book reading that were gathered in a 2-year, small-scale ethnographic case study in Spain. Data analysis focuses on the complex interplay between the storybook app's interactive features and the children's responses to them. Our findings show that interactive elements increase the child's autonomy, as they tend to promote the importance of the reader, positioning him or her as a collaborator, storyteller, an author or an internal character in the fiction; something that can materialise in exciting narrative strategies that can trigger powerful responses to digital literary texts in emergent readers, including playing, creating new fictions or engaging emotionally with the story. Finally, we argue that the Reader Response models that have been used over recent decades to understand children's reading experiences with storybooks need to be revised to better understand their current experiences with interactive texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research presented addresses the need to integrate into the educational system the immigrant children and explores the role of the discussion of literary texts in the language and cultural reception of newcomers. Studies of language learning in multilingual contexts (Guasch, 2010; Siqués Jofre, 2008; Vila, Siquéand Roig, 2006) highlight educational practices focused toshared meaning construction, knowledge of the school language and attention to the processes of identity construction in the success of the process. The research carried out by the GRETEL team at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona is in this line and addresses specifically the incidence of interpretive discussion of picture books in multilingual classrooms. The first part of the article summarizes the methodology of experimentation on the activities for the shared construction of meaning. The second part analyses some of the responses given by the children during the process of interpretation of the books, in particular, the answers focusing the compositional aspects and intertextual aspects of the texts. These results provide information both on the possibilities of literary activities in the process of reception of immigrant students, as well as on the way in which children construct the meaning of texts in situations of collective discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]