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This study explored the quality of interactions in mother-child shared reading with a print book and with an electronic book on an i-Pad. The study involved a Turkish mother and her 5-year-old son who were observed at home when reading the printed book "Ay'i kim çaldi?" ("Who stole the moon?") and its exact digital match. The shared book reading interactions were analysed in terms of (a) the amount of talk with the different book formats and (b) the content of the mother-child talk including the focus of the talk, expansion of ideas and behavioural-related talk. The results revealed that print book reading engaged the child in higher-level thinking compared to digital book reading. There was greater frequency of non-immediate talk in the print book reading compared to the digital book reading. Also, results suggested that the digital book encouraged more behaviour-related talk related to negotiating the book sharing routine.

This study investigated the relationship between children's attitudes towards reading and their parents' gendered views about literacy (GVL). It was assumed that parents may have GVL by favouring girls in reading activities, which could limit boys' enjoyment in reading activities. This study was conducted with 31 five-year-old children in first term at a school in South Australia. To measure children's enjoyment in reading-related activities, each child completed an individually administered Literacy Attitude Scale (LAS). Parents completed a questionnaire about their views on girls' and boys' early literacy and their book preferences. It was found that the parents' GVL were significantly and negatively related to children's attitudes towards reading. Importantly, both male and female children of parents, with highly GVL, exhibited lower attitudes towards reading. Overall, girls reported significantly more positive attitudes towards reading than boys. A weak but notable correlation was found between parents' perceptions about their children's attitudes towards reading and their children's self-reported reading attitudes.