Fostering Child Language with Short-Term Digital Storybook Interventions
Dialogic Reading or Screen-Based Story Exposure?
Abstract
Abstract: Research suggests that storybook reading fosters children’s language skills in the early years, with digital formats bearing new potential. This experimental pilot study with stratified randomization evaluates the effects of digital storybook reading in kindergarten on global language, vocabulary, verb learning (irregular past), and narrative skills. We assessed two reading methods: (a) dialogic reading and (b) supervised, independent screen-based story exposure. Twenty-seven children (aged 4 – 5 years) received a short-term small-group intervention (3 sessions) with a digital storybook on a tablet using one of the two methods with audio narration. Children in the dialogic reading condition made significant gains in receptive vocabulary, expressive target vocabulary, and verb learning. Postcontrasts further revealed a substantial advantage of dialogic reading for children’s narrative skills. Age-appropriate digital storybooks designed in line with insights from cognitive and developmental psychology may be used in early education to foster children’s language skills, if read dialogically.
Zusammenfassung: Forschungsbefunde belegen die Wirksamkeit von Bilderbuchbetrachtungen zur Unterstützung sprachlicher Fähigkeiten im frühkindlichen Bildungskontext und deuten das Potential digitaler Formate an. Die vorliegende experimentelle Pilotstudie mit geschichteter Randomisierung untersucht Effekte digitaler Bilderbuchbetrachtungen im Kindergarten auf globale Sprachfähigkeiten, Wortschatz, Verblernen und Erzählfähigkeiten. Zwei Methoden, (a) Dialogisches Lesen und (b) eine supervidierte, selbstständige Bilderbuchbetrachtung, werden verglichen. Siebenundzwanzig Kinder (4 – 5 Jahre) nahmen an einer Kurzzeitintervention (3 Einheiten) mit einem digitalen Bilderbuch auf dem Tablet in der Kleingruppe nach einer der beiden Methoden teil. Dabei wurde die automatische Erzählfunktion genutzt. Kinder in Gruppen, in denen dialogisch gelesen wurde, zeigten signifikante Verbesserungen im rezeptiven Wortschatz, expressiven Zielwortschatz und im Verblernen. Post-Kontraste ergaben zudem einen substantiellen Vorteil Dialogischen Lesens auf die Erzählfähigkeiten. Altersgemäße digitale Bilderbücher, deren technische Umsetzung entwicklungs- und kognitionspsychologische Erkenntnisse berücksichtigt, können in der frühen Bildung nach der Methode des Dialogischen Lesens zur Sprachunterstützung eingesetzt werden.
Despite numerous attempts to provide apt language support in early childhood education and care (ECEC), the proportion of preschool-aged children with language difficulties still ranges between 15 % and 41 %1 in the various German federal states (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2020). This calls for effective early interventions since oral and narrative language skills have proved highly predictive of school success (Burchinal et al., 2016; Shanahan & Lonigan, 2010). Shared book-reading is a promising method. Storybooks can provide children with well-formed input, and storytime is an excellent opportunity to use language-facilitation strategies in interactions. The amount of input children receive has been linked to language skills in the first years of life, which in turn predict language skills at the end of primary school (Hart & Risley, 1995; 2003). Optimizing input so that the linguistic units children are on the verge of acquiring occur highly frequently has been shown to foster learning in naturalistic contexts (e. g., “motherese” is known for repetitions; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1986; Weinert & Lockl, 2008), to support foreign-language learning (“massed input”; Madlener, 2015), and it is a widely-used strategy in speech therapy (“input specification”/”modeling”; Kauschke & Rath, 2017). Tailored input can facilitate learning new linguistic units, including school-related academic language (cf. Cummins, 1979). Children’s language skills prosper when repeated high-quality input is combined with language facilitation strategies that stimulate children’s production (questions, prompts), model their utterances (corrective feedback, expansion, extension, adaptive input), and provide motivation (interest, praise) (De Rivera et al., 2005; Girolametto et al., 2003; Whitehurst et al., 1988; 1994).
Storybook Reading
Storytime can support children’s language if children’s interests and attention span are considered in story selection (Bellon & Ogletree, 2000). When story characteristics like plot and language complexity lie within children’s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), i. e., somewhat challenging but not too difficult, book-reading activities are expected to be most effective (Fletcher & Reese, 2005).
Language in storybooks often involves a more literary style as well as more sophisticated or academic registers. The plot frequently contains repetitive elements linked to reoccurring linguistic units (e. g., in Snow White, the evil stepmother asks the mirror again and again “Looking-glass, looking-glass on the wall, who in this land is the fairest of all?” Grimm et al., 2014/1812, 4). Additionally, children enjoy listening to their favorite stories many times. Repetition is a crucial aspect of learning. Accordingly, repeated exposure and massed input have been shown to facilitate language learning in naturalistic settings, print book reading and during audio storytime. Input frequency plays an essential role in the natural acquisition of words as well as more complex morphology and syntax. Linguistic units that are salient and frequent in the input are usually learned earlier in language acquisition than less frequent ones: Mom or was are typically learned earlier than optician or grew. Moreover, children make fewer errors on highly frequent forms (Maslen et al., 2004). Repeated exposure to the same print story proved to facilitate children’s acquisition of new vocabulary (Horst et al., 2011; Sénéchal, 1997). Recurring audio storytime with pictorial support improved children’s morphological (plural formation) skills (Müller et al., 2014). Repeatedly listening to the same audio story was further linked to improvements in children’s phonological memory, their sentence completion ability, and word memory (Niebuhr-Siebert & Ritterfeld, 2012). The potential of audio input might lie in the higher degree of standardization compared to print storybook reading or naturalistic settings, because voice, intonation, pronunciation, pitch, rhythm, etc., remain constant. Audio narration functions of digital storybooks might also bring this advantage with them, as recent data suggests (O’Toole & Kannass, 2018).
Shared book reading settings support the use of language facilitation strategies in multiple ways, with dialogic reading techniques leading the way. Dialogic reading entails using CROWD2 and PEER3 strategies (Whitehurst et al., 1988; 1994). Through prompts, open-ended, and closed questions, children are encouraged to complete sentences, recall story elements or content, elaborate and expand ideas, and connect them to their own experiences. The adult provides help whenever necessary and evaluates responses. Training parents or educators in the use of dialogic reading strategies during storytime resulted in 3- to 4-year-olds showing improvements on expressive language measures (producing more multi-word utterances and fewer one-word utterances). More and more international research corroborates that dialogic reading is a promising and affordable approach for language facilitation in early education: A meta-analysis found medium-sized effects for interactive storybook reading on oral language skills, receptive, and expressive vocabulary in daycare settings (Mol et al., 2009). In German kindergartens, different dialogic reading interventions (8 – 24 sessions à 30 mins) with children with a need for language support showed consistent small to medium-size effects on language production (measured using ESR; Grimm & Aktaş, 2015), morphology/morphosyntax, and comprehension, while findings on vocabulary measures were mixed, ranging from no effects to small and medium-size effects (Ennemoser et al., 2013; Ennemoser et al., 2015; Hartung, 2015). On the other hand, a meta-analysis not restricted to daycare settings revealed only a small aggregated effect of shared book reading (any type, not just dialogic reading), which became negligible when control groups were active as well (Noble et al., 2019). In fact, the WWC Intervention reports indicate that interactive shared reading methods other than dialogic reading might be less effective in supporting children’s oral language (What Works Clearinghouse, 2007; 2015).
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital Storybooks
The availability and prevalence of digital media (Pew Research Center, 2019) and, more specifically, digital storybooks offer new opportunities to improve children’s language skills and may thus contribute to later school success. Meta-analytic findings suggest that reading well-designed digital storybooks can lead to equivalent or higher comprehension and vocabulary scores than print book reading in children older than 3, at home or in ECEC (Reich et al., 2016; Takacs et al., 2014). Another systematic review found small to medium-sized effects of digital storybook reading on comprehension measures in institutional contexts (preschool through year 5). But various reading methods and comparison conditions were included (Zucker et al., 2009). A meta-analysis focusing on ECEC revealed effects of digital storybook reading on receptive and expressive vocabulary as well as story-retell abilities compared to regular childcare and effects on receptive language and retell abilities compared to print-book reading (Egert et al., 2022a). A specific dictionary function within the digital storybook can lead to large effects on vocabulary (Egert et al., 2022b; Korat & Shamir, 2007). The majority of interventions in both meta-analyses were short-term interventions with 3 – 6 sessions and a total intervention dosage of less than 2 hours. Almost all evidence from ECEC settings is based on studies in which children used digital storybooks individually, independently, and in an isolated setting, mostly with headphones (Egert et al., 2022a, b). This contrasts with findings in ECEC, which suggest that working with small groups of two to three (maximum four) children in activities such as storybook reading is ideal for supporting language development (Hofmann et al., 2008). Small groups allow each child a fair amount of speaking time and further enable the educator to adapt to the individual children’s needs.
The positive effects of digital storybooks have been linked to the contingent presentation of visual and auditory input as well as interactive and multimedia elements that are congruent to the plot. Digital storybooks can present matching visual input and audio narration with high temporal contiguity (Cordes et al., 2020; Mayer, 2005), thus facilitating audiovisual integration of relevant information and with it story comprehension in comparison to print book reading (Altun, 2018). Moreover, digital storybooks with animated rather than static pictures were shown to increase children’s comprehension scores (Sarı et al., 2019). Small effects of multimedia-enhanced digital storybooks (with hotspots, animations, music, or sound) were found on children’s story comprehension and expressive vocabulary compared to orally presented stories with static illustrations (Takacs et al., 2015). Multimedia features were congruent to content, e. g., animations focused on important story elements, and drew the children’s attention to relevant story aspects, thus providing scaffolding support. Irrelevant, incongruent interactive features, on the contrary, distract children (Bus et al., 2020; Cordes et al., 2020; Mayer et al., 2005). Along these lines, picture activation during reading was negatively correlated to vocabulary learning (r = –.55; Shamir, 2009). Unrestricted access to digital games during storytime halved the time children spent on the story and the number of digital book pages they explored (De Jong & Bus, 2002). It seems that activation windows for interactive elements need to be restricted either technically (e. g., by being highlighted only after the audio narration has read a page) or through the implementation of social rules during digital storytime by the educator to reduce distractions from the plot.
The reported advantages of digital storybooks occur when the cognitive theory of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2005) is taken into account in selecting appropriate storybooks. Parallel, contingent presentation of matching visual and acoustic information facilitates processing, as does highlighting important plot elements. On the other hand, unnecessary technical features seize processing capacity in children’s working memory, which is then unavailable for processing relevant story aspects (see Cordes et al., 2020, for an application of cognitive theory of multimedia learning to digital storybooks).
Most research on digital storybooks to date has focused on isolated activities, which neither represent the current policy guidelines of the German federal states for fostering language development in the early years nor the pedagogical self-conception among German educators (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2020). Instead, governmental regulations and pilot projects4 recommend more embedded and integrated activities or small-group interventions. The evidence for using embedded approaches and cooperative reading strategies within digital storybook activities is rather small, though. Results from a pilot study indicate an advantage of interactive digital storybook reading on vocabulary compared to isolated digital story use and print-book reading (Roskos et al., 2016). For the German-speaking context, to the best of our knowledge, to date no intervention studies have explored how digital storybooks are best read to support children’s language most effectively.
Research Question
The research questions of our pilot study are based (1) on the positive results of using language facilitation strategies in the dialogic reading of print books, (2) on effects revealed for digital storybooks with congruent multimedia features, and (3) on findings showing that repeated exposure to the same input enhances language learning. The main question is whether children profit from using digital storybooks in daycare centers in small groups (of two to three children):
(1) Do children benefit from short-term interventions with a digital storybook in ECEC?
To learn more about the effects caused by the digital storybook itself and by adults using language facilitation strategies, we compared (a) dialogic digital storybook reading to (b) supervised independent storybook exposure. Both methods of reading digital storybooks used the prerecorded audio narration of the storybook to keep the story input presentation constant.
(2) Which method of digital storybook reading – (a) dialogic reading or (b) supervised independent story exposure – is more effective for facilitating children’s language skills in ECEC?
We explored the potential effects of the short-term small-group interventions (three sessions with the same book) on several receptive and expressive language outcomes that have proved tractable in previous research (Sarı et al., 2019; Segal-Drori et al., 2010; Shamir, 2009).
Method
We conducted the pilot study in the spring of 2021 under strict COVID-19 regulations. Because of the pandemic and related health regulations, we had to meet several requirements regarding group assignment and external professionals entering the childcare center. Our language assessor and implementers were tested daily for COVID-19. Implementers were assigned to fixed kindergarten classrooms and intervention groups to avoid mixing more people than strictly necessary.
We used a stratified randomization procedure (see Figure 1) to prevent type I error and an imbalance between the treatment groups (Kernan et al., 1999). First, we stratified the sample considering factors of language learning that might influence the prognosis, thus forming two parallelized samples of children based on age in months, gender, mono-/bilingualism, and receptive vocabulary pretest score. We randomly assigned the samples to the dialogic reading or supervised reading conditions. Second, we formed small groups (12) within the two conditions. Small groups consisted of two to three children. Because of the delayed declaration of consent of one child, one group included four children and could not be split in two because the childcare center was operating in emergency care mode at the time because of COVID-19 restrictions. For the same reason, we could not mix children from different classrooms but rather formed small homogeneous groups regarding their receptive vocabulary scores, i. e., weaker children were grouped together. We expected more homogeneous groups to make it easier for the children to actively participate in the intervention and for the adult to adapt to the children’s language level.
Sample
In total, 27 children aged 4 to 5 years from one kindergarten in Bavaria received one of the two reading interventions with a digital storybook. Children in the dialogic reading condition (n = 14) had a mean age of 59.33 months (SD = 5.17); children in the supervised reading condition (n = 13) were 58.23 months on average (SD = 7.84). Three children were receiving logopaedic treatment, but only because of pronunciation difficulties, and no child had been diagnosed with a language disorder. Bilingual children and boys and girls were assigned to conditions equally (dialogic: bilingual = 2; male = 6; female = 8; supervised: bilingual = 2; male = 5; female = 8). All four bilingual children were born in Germany and exposed to German from birth (simultaneous bilinguals). T-tests and Chi²-tests showed no significant differences in any pretest outcome measures, and groups were equivalent regarding stratification factors (e. g., age, gender, bilingualism).
Instruments
We used standardized and treatment-sensitive outcome measures to assess language globally, vocabulary, verb learning (irregular past), and narrative skills. Pre- and posttests were conducted the week before and after the intervention, so that the two tests were, on average, 8 to 10 days apart. Each language test took approximately 20 to 30 minutes per child. A psychologist performed the language assessment tasks and was blind to the condition.
Global Language
We assessed overall expressive language skills using the subtest Encoding Semantic Relations (ESR) from a German language development test for 3- to 5-year-old children (“Sprachentwicklungstest für drei- bis fünfjährige Kinder,” SETK 3 – 5; Grimm & Aktaş, 2015). The children were presented with picture cards showing subjects in different positions, e. g., a horse on a yellow table or a turtle in a bathtub. They were asked to describe what they saw, and their answers were coded for accuracy and length of correct sentence constituents. The retest reliability for this normed and standardized subtest was r = .71, and internal consistency was α = .91 at pretest and α = .90 at posttest.
Vocabulary
Receptive Vocabulary
We assessed receptive vocabulary using a shortened and adapted version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test IV (PPVT; Dunn & Dunn, 2007; Lenhard et al., 2015). The 4-year-olds were presented with 60 items, and the 5-year-olds with 75 items. Children were required to point to the one of four pictures that matched the word the language assessor told them. Retest reliability was r = .94; split-half reliability (Spearman-Brown) reached r = .59 at pretest and r = .65 at posttest.
Expressive Vocabulary
We measured the children’s story-related expressive vocabulary using a target vocabulary test with 8 items that occurred only once each in the story but were relevant for understanding the plot. The children were asked to explain word meanings, and responses were coded using a 3-point scale: 0 = incorrect, 1 = semantic proximity to the target word, 2 = correct (e. g., What is an optician? “He looks after your teeth” = 0, “glasses” = 1, “He gives you glasses when you can’t see well” = 2). Retest reliability was r = .55; internal consistencies reached α = .49 for baseline and α = .61 for posttest measures.
Verb Learning (Irregular Past)
A newly-designed cloze test measured the children’s accuracy using the past tense of 12 irregular verbs. Children were asked to fill empty slots in the acoustically presented story (e. g., “Der Zoowärter war davon so überrascht, dass er einen Riesenschreck _______ (bekam) und ganz laut ‘Hiiiiilfe’ _________ (rief/ schrie).” Literal translation using German word order: “The zookeeper was so surprised that he a huge shock _______ (got) and very loudly ‘Help’ ________ (shouted/screamed).”). Slots required third-person singular or third-person plural forms in the simple past. Target verbs occurred in the digital storybook one to five times – resulting in exposure to 3 to 15 tokens for each verb within the three reading sessions. The story format made the simple past the preferred tense. Semantically correct evasive forms (e. g., hatte “had”) were rated correct as well as the use of the perfect tense of adequate verbs. Retest reliability was r = .86; internal consistency was satisfactory at pretest (α = .73) and posttest (α = .79).
Narrative Skills
Expressive Narrative Skills: Story Retell (Nontarget)
Using five questions about setting, plot, and protagonists, the children retold a short story unrelated to the digital storybook (e. g., What did the children do?). Responses were coded for accuracy and mean length of utterance (MLU). For the accuarcy score, retest reliability reached r = .88, and internal consistency was α = .70 for pretest and posttest. Retest reliability for the MLU was r = .55, and Cronbach’s alpha was α = .69 at pretest and α = .75 at posttest.
Story Comprehension
We assessed comprehension of the story presented in the digital storybook only at posttest because the children had never been exposed to the story before the study. We used a specifically designed protagonist quiz. The children were asked to respond to 10 questions about story content verbally or by pointing to one of four picture cards showing the four main protagonists of the story (Oscar, dragon, Oscar’s mother, villagers). The answers were coded for accuracy. Internal consistency for accuracy was satisfactory (α = .72).
Expressive Narrative Skills: Story Retell (Target)
Fourteen questions inquired about the setting, protagonists, plot, and feelings, and thus encouraged children to retell the story (e.g., How did Oscar trick the dragon?). Responses were rated for accuracy and MLU only at posttest, since the children were unfamiliar with the story before the intervention. All words were included. The accuracy score was reliable at α = .81, and the MLU at α = .74.
Intervention
Digital Storybook
We exposed the children in both intervention conditions to the German digital storybook Oskar und der sehr hungrige Drache (English version: Oscar and the Very Hungry Dragon, Oetinger Verlag & Krause, 2015). The story is about a small boy named Oscar who is selected to serve as a meal for a hungry dragon. But Oscar saves himself using a ruse and his amazing cooking skills, which the dragon grows to enjoy immensely.
The digital storybook was selected very carefully, taking into consideration (1) child-related aspects, (2) story characteristics, and (3) the technical realization of the digital storybook as well as the match between (1) child and (2) story characteristics. (1) Children’s language skills, their attention span, and interests were taken into account (Bellon & Ogletree, 2000). (2) We thus selected a story with fairytale elements that came highly recommended5. The narrative tone was rather literary, and the language, e. g., grammatical complexity and multifacetedness of vocabulary, was fairly sophisticated, to challenge children and ideally encourage progress within their zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). The plot was coherent and followed the classical narrational structure with a conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. (3) Crucially, we chose the digital storybook based on how well it considered and implemented criteria from cognitive and educational psychology (Bus et al., 2020; Cordes et al., 2020; Egert et al., 2021). Thus, the illustrations, animations, and hotspots were overwhelmingly congruent with content, and no irrelevant or distracting features and functions such as games were included. The reason was that the technical realization of digital storybooks had been shown to be central for learning (Verhallen et al., 2006; cf. the introduction above).
Intervention Procedure
The children experienced the digital storybook through the app Books on an iPad. They used the digital storybook in small groups of 2 – 4 children together with an implementer. The short-term intervention entailed three book-reading sessions over the course of a week (total intervention time: approximately 60 – 90 minutes). The decision on the number of sessions and total intervention time was based on findings from two recent meta-analyses on digital storybook reading in ECEC (Egert et al., 2022a, 2022b). In line with the suggestions from experimental studies on language learning in ECEC (Hofmann et al., 2008), we implemented the digital reading activities in small groups of 2 – 3 children (with one exception because of administrative challenges; see Figure 1). In both conditions, a prerecorded voice (audio narration) read the story to the children. After listening to each page, children took turns touching the available animation hotspots on the tablet screen. The implementer discussed the turn-taking with the children before starting the digital story to reduce organizational talk during storybook reading.
Dialogic Reading Group
After exploring the animations, the implementer of the intervention group asked the children questions based on the CROWD strategy of dialogic reading (Whitehurst et al., 1994). Questions aimed at the story’s content included open-ended and closed questions as well as a completion prompt and served to deepen comprehension and relate the story to children’s experiences. Using PEER strategies, the implementer encouraged the children to talk about the story and then evaluated, extended, and elaborated children’s utterances. The implementer followed a protocol designed to ensure relatively standardized reading sessions and thus implementation fidelity. The first reading session focused on basic story comprehension and the main plot twists (narrow focus on the story); in the second and third sessions, the children were invited to connect story events to their own experience and knowledge, e. g., to talk about their feelings prompted by how a protagonist feels at a certain point of the story or to report personal cooking experiences or knowledge about food when one protagonist cooks for the other in the narrative (decontextualized focus) (see Cordes, Egert & Hartig, 2022).
Supervised Independent Story Exposure
In this condition, children explored the digital storybook independently. The implementer supervised the small-group reading experience and ensured fair turn-taking regarding hotspot activation. The implementer was passive and passed story-related questions from the children back to them/to the group (e. g., Child: “Why is he doing that?” – Implementer: “What do you think?”).
Fidelity
Average reading sessions took 30.67 minutes (SD = 5.60) in dialogic reading groups and 21 minutes (SD = 3.44) in supervised groups. Attendance was 100% in the dialogic group compared to 94.87% in the comparison group. The implementers’ notes on the protocol ensured that all planned questions were asked during the reading sessions (1 completion prompt, 23 recall prompts, 9 open-ended prompts, 21 wh-prompts, 12 distancing prompts). The children assessed their reading experience via smileys. They indicated that they enjoyed the story as well as the digital reading experience, and that they liked the implementers by using the “happy smiley” almost exclusively.
Analysis
Change scores, effect size estimates, and level of significance were conducted using the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis CMA software version 3 (Borenstein et al., 2014). We used Hedges’ g, an effect size that corrects for bias in small samples (Hedges & Olkin, 1985). According to Cohen (1988), an effect size of g ≥ 0.2 is small, g ≥ 0.5 is medium, and g ≥ 0.8 is large. We estimated change scores using mean, standard deviation, and number of participants for each group as well as pre-post correlation. To assess the added value of dialogic reading in contrast to supervised reading, we estimated the effects for the interaction (Time x Condition). Further, postcontrasts served as impact measures for narrative abilities with treatment-aligned measures without pretest. We used the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure for multiple testing to estimate the false discovery rate (α = 5 %) and report the adjusted p-values (Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995). We made the correction separately for change scores, post contrasts, and the Time x Condition interaction.
Results
Child Progress
Children in (a) the dialogic reading condition made significant progress on several language measures (see Table 1): Change scores in the range of small to medium-sized effects were found for receptive vocabulary (g = 0.40; p = .020; pBHcorr = .040) and verb learning (irregular past tense) (g = 0.34; p = .001; pBHcorr = .003). Significant large changes were revealed for expressive vocabulary (g = 1.11; p=.000; pBHcorr = .000). We did not find significant progress on global language (encoding semantic relations) and narrative scores (accuracy and MLU) for retelling a nontarget story.
Children in (b) the supervised, independent condition showed only marginal progress. There was a (nonsignificant) positive trend on receptive vocabulary growth (g = 0.32; p = .035; pBHcorr = .210). But there was no substantial progress in global language or narrative skills (nontarget story) during the intervention period.
Added Value of Dialogic Reading
Estimating the effect sizes based on the interaction of Time x Condition revealed an advantage of the dialogic reading intervention for target expressive vocabulary (g = 1.56; p = .000; pBHcorr = .000). The other language scores (e. g., receptive vocabulary, narrative skills, verb-learning) indicated an added value of the dialogic reading activity in the range of a small to medium-size effect, but impact estimates did not reach significance.
After the intervention, we tested the children from both groups on narrative abilities related to the digital storybook used in both interventions (see Table 2). The children in the dialogic reading condition outperformed the children in the (b) supervised condition. There was a significant added value of dialogic reading in the accuracy of retelling the digital story (g = 0.95; p = .016; pBHcorr = .048). There was also a trend toward the dialogic reading condition being scored higher in target story comprehension (g = 0.81; p = .037; pBHcorr = .055) and the mean length of the utterance of story retells (g = 0.68; p = .078; pBHcorr = .078), but both results just missed the significance level of p < .05 after Benjamini-Hochberg corrections.
Discussion
Reading digital storybooks dialogically showed the potential to foster children’s language skills in a short-term intervention, where the children experienced the same story three times. Their general receptive vocabulary increased as well as treatment-sensitive measures of expressive vocabulary and verb learning. Target story comprehension and retell abilities of children who read dialogically with an adult were, or tended to be, higher than those of children who were exposed to the digital storybook independently in small groups with a supervising adult.
Vocabulary
Dialogic reading increased children’s receptive (standardized measure) and targeted expressive vocabulary. For supervised reading, there was a trend toward receptive vocabulary improvement. Previous studies like the meta-analysis by Takacs and colleagues (2015) included any type of digital stories and struggled to detect an impact on receptive vocabulary. However, our positive findings on receptive vocabulary corroborate results from O’Toole and Kannass (2018), who found effects on word learning for digital storybook reading and the use of audio narration in digital storytime. The meta-analysis by Egert et al. (2022b) also revealed large effects of digital storybook interventions in ECEC on receptive vocabulary compared to regular childcare. Notably, many studies included in the analysis assessed treatment-sensitive target vocabulary, while the effects of the present study included a standardized measure, i. e., the PPVT.
Dialogic reading has repeatedly been linked to improvements in expressive language skills in the past, likely because the interactive nature of the reading situation encourages children to talk (Mol et al., 2008; Whitehurst et al., 1994; 1998). New meta-analytic evidence further corroborates the effects on expressive vocabulary for digital storytime (Egert et al., 2022a). Previous findings comparing adult-led print-book reading and children’s independent use of digital storybooks (Korat & Shamir, 2007) revealed effects on word learning, when the adult or a digital dictionary function explained new, critical words during the reading experience (Egert et al., 2022b). The present study extends previous research by examining expressive vocabulary learning in settings where a small group of children reads a digital storybook dialogically with an adult.
However, our results must be interpreted with caution – even if the findings align with other studies – because we used a newly-developed instrument that reached only mediocre internal consistency scores. Nevertheless, further research should analyze the idea that scaffolding for new word learning can be taken on by a technical function of the digital storybook (as in Korat and Shamir’s 2007 study) or by an adult involved in an interactive setting with the child/ren using either a print or a digital storybook.
Verb Learning
During a brief 1-week intervention period, the dialogic reading group improved on using irregular past tense forms of target verbs. Case studies like that of Müller-Brauers et al. (2017) suggest that children rely on (morpho–)syntactic story input in their own subsequent productions. Ennemoser and colleagues (2013; 2015) showed the effects of dialogic reading on morphological skills after a considerably longer and more intensive intervention for children with a need for language support. The combination of dialogic reading and audio narration may have enriched children’s naturalistic language environment and facilitated verb learning. Presumably, it is critical to select a storybook that (1) matches children’s language level, i. e., is within their zone of proximal development, and (2) includes many examples of the structure that children are to be trained on. With this in mind, digital storybooks might be used to improve children’s academic language skills (Cummins, 1979), e. g., linguistic structures that are less commonly used in everyday language, such as the German simple past, nominalizations, or complex/technical vocabulary.
Narrative Skills
Dialogic reading of the digital storybook has the strength to foster children’s narrative skills significantly more than supervised digital storybook exposure. The children in the dialogic reading condition were more accurate in their story retells and gave marginally longer, more comprehensive accounts of the story’s plot. They also showed somewhat better story comprehension abilities. Zucker et al. (2009) and Takacs et al. (2015) found small to medium-sized effects on comprehension measures. Comparison groups in their meta-analyses were very diverse, though, ranging from no-treatment to print book-reading, audio-only, and computer games. The present findings suggest that neither digital storybooks alone nor multimedia enhancements can induce the degree of story comprehension that the dialogic reading of digital books can. The large effects on target story retell abilities are in line with meta-analytic evidence from ECEC that revealed large effects on story retells compared to regular childcare and small to medium-sized effects compared to print-book reading (Egert et al., 2022a). In the present pilot study, story-retell accuracy further generalized somewhat to an unrelated story, such that the dialogic reading group but not the supervised reading group improved (descriptively) after the intervention. The advantages of interactive formats of book-reading corroborate results from print-book interventions in Germany (see Ennemoser et al., 2013, 2015). Directing children’s attention toward relevant story aspects through PEER and CROWD strategies might have contributed to their understanding of narrative story structure. Further, ensuring children’s active role in conversations (observe – wait – listen) and empowering them as storytellers in dialogic reading (Whitehurst et al., 1994) might have contributed to their marginally increased utterance length.
Limitations
Because of pandemic circumstances, our results are limited to the short-term effects of digital storybooks in ECEC; sustainability and maintenance could not be assessed. Since the advantages of activities with digital storybooks in ECEC, in contrast to regular childcare (business as usual, passive control condition) and to activities with print books, had been meta-analytically confirmed (Egert et al., 2022a), the present pilot study focused on comparing two different reading methods of digital storybooks in small-group settings. Therefore, we decided to use a two-group experimental design with an active (equivalent) comparison group. However, the absence of a passive control or placebo condition poses the risk that uncontrolled factors may have affected the validity of our study (e. g., history, maturity, or testing effects).
Compared to previous research on dialogic reading with small to medium effect sizes (e. g., Ennemoser et al., 2013, 2015; Hartung, 2015; Mol et al., 2009; Noble et al., 2019), our intervention impact seems rather large. This might be the case because of several reasons: (1) Implementation fidelity was high, and the intervention procedure was highly standardized. Our implementers followed the protocol and applied preset prompts, whereas, in other studies (e. g., Hartung, 2015), the implementers could choose which prompts they used. Additionally, our story was read by the audio narration in contrast to being read by the implementers as in the other studies, thus providing a higher level of standardization in the input (Ennemoser et al., 2013; 2015). (2) The digital book complied with cognitive psychological insights, thus enhancing the learning experience (Cordes et al., 2020; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015; Mayer, 2017). One cannot assume that the findings generalize to all commercially available digital storybooks, since the vast majority of the (book) apps on the market aimed at children is not in line with scientific evidence of how children learn (Meyer et al., 2021). (3) We primarily used treatment-sensitive language measures. Vocabulary, verb learning (irregular past), and several narrative skills measures were related to the digital storybook. Effects on standardized measures were limited to receptive vocabulary. (4) To ensure time-efficient language assessment, the newly developed, treatment-sensitive instrument for expressive vocabulary comprised a rather small number of items, which might be one reason for the lower internal consistency values (Tavakol & Dennick, 2011). In this case, we used target words from the story children were asked to explain. We cannot ensure that those words (a) were equally unfamiliar to children at pretest and (b) that they had the same level of difficulty and decontextualization (e. g., optician vs. eager). At baseline, the items seemed to measure the construct with less precision (and more missings), violating aspects of the tau equivalence (McNeish, 2018), a fundamental assumption to estimate Cronbach’s alpha. At the posttest, all children were familiar with the target words, and the scale became more congeneric. (5) Timespan between the pretest and posttest was about 10 days, so the risk of a retesting effect cannot be entirely excluded. This issue does not hold, though, for the narrative skills tests on the target story. Children were first assessed on the target story at the posttest because they did not know the story before. A no-treatment control group would have remained unfamiliar with the story and could not have been compared to intervention groups (see, e. g., Sarı et al., 2019, p. 218; Shamir, 2009, p. 84, for a similar procedure). (6) Our study was conducted with typically-developing kindergarteners in contrast to experiments by Ennemoser and colleagues (2013; 2015) and Hartung (2015), where the samples consisted of children with a need for language support. (7) The sample of the present study was rather small, which is in line with other pilot studies (Roskos et al., 2016). To prevent the small-study effect and to improve the power of our pilot study, we used stratified randomization of factors that might have influenced the prognosis (Kernan et al., 1999). Nevertheless, there might be a risk of overestimating impact because of certain heterogeneity within the samples as in all small studies. Because of the sample size, no subgroup or clustered analyses were possible. For all these reasons, replicating these findings with a larger sample is recommended.
We did not find any effects of digital storybook reading, be it dialogic or supervised, on the global measure of encoding semantic relations, even though Ennemoser and colleagues (2013; 2015) showed the effects of dialogic print storybook reading on ESR. There are three explanations: First, our prompts did not explicitly aim at training picture descriptions (such as in the ESR), with only one prompt per reading session encouraging children to discuss what is depicted in the respective illustration. Second, the intervention dose and the number of sessions of Ennemoser’s studies were much higher, with 8–40 30-minute sessions over 4–8 weeks, making transfer effects to more global language measures more likely than our nano-intervention. Third, our sample included typically-developing children, whereas Ennemoser and colleagues’ participants needed language support.
We do not refer to our effects on verb learning (irregular past) as morphology learning per se. We understand the acquisition of regular and irregular inflectional morphology as schema-based (Bybee, 1995). Rather, we only included verbs in our cloze test that had occurred in the intervention story and did not assess children’s ability to generalize the respective irregular past tense schema. Thus, using the term “verb learning (irregular past)” allows both interpretations: mere rote learning of irregular forms in a lexical sense (e. g., Marcus et al., 1992; Pinker & Prince, 1988) as well as exemplar learning as a step in the process of schema development (Bybee et al., 1995).
Implications and Conclusion
The present effects of reading digital storybooks dialogically are promising: 4 – 5-year-old children profited from the small-group intervention in several language areas, including receptive and expressive vocabulary, verb learning (see academic language), and narrative skills. Additionally, even supervised exposure to digital storybooks in small groups might result in mild (nonsignificant) improvements in language abilities (receptive vocabulary and verb learning). The fact that the short-term intervention entailed only three sessions and a total of 60 – 90 minutes makes it a highly feasible method for fostering children’s language in ECEC contexts. Educators do not require elaborate training but must merely follow the protocol step by step. The protocol helps educators organize the digital reading situation to create a positive and constructive atmosphere and set rules regarding digital device use. It further allows educators to ensure children’s comprehension of major story events and subsequently allows educators to link the story to children’s experience (decontextualization), extend, and elaborate on story elements. Nano-interventions like ours bear the strength of supporting learning in specific language areas. We believe that children’s language skills benefit when educators are offered easy-to-implement methods and the expertise to select adequate digital storybooks for digital storytime6.
We want to thank the children, parents, and staff of the child care center in the Bavarian uplands for their tremendous effort to make this project possible during the pandemic. Special thanks go to Stella Fink and Fiona Blessing for implementing the small-group digital storytime. We further thank our very reliable language assessor.
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1Only data from federal states that assessed language abilities of all children (rather than certain groups only, e. g., multilingual children) are referred to here.
2CROWD is short for Completion prompts, Recall prompts, Open-ended prompts, Wh-prompts and Distancing prompts.
3PEER is short for Prompt, Evaluate, Expand, and Recall.
4For example, Medienkompetenz in der Frühpädagogik stärken, a pilot study with 100 Bavarian daycare centers (Reichert-Garschhammer, 2020), or KiTab.rlp – Medienbildung mit Tablets in der Kita in Rhineland-Palatinate (Bastian et al., 2018).
5Among others, Staatsinstitut für Schulqualität und Bildungsforschung, ISB, Munich: https://www.lesen.bayern.de/9783789167485/; Teachers’ Club of the German Reading Foundation (Stiftung Lesen): https://www.derlehrerclub.de/buch/210; Publisher’s Weekly: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7358-2306-8
6For example, Guidelines for Dialogic Reading with Digital Storybooks for Educators and Parents (Cordes et al., 2022)
