Multimedia and Literacy Development: Improving Achievement for Young Learners

"Multimedia and Literacy Development" broadens the field of reading research by looking beyond print-only experiences to young readers' encounters with multimedia stories on the Internet and DVD. Multimedia storybooks include, in addition to static pictures and written text, features such as oral text, animations, sounds, zooms, and scaffolds designed to help convey meaning. These features are changing how young children read text, and also provide technology-based scaffolds for helping struggling readers. This book reports experimental research and practices with multimedia stories indicating that new dimensions of media contribute to young children's ability to understand stories and to read texts independently. It is the first synthesis of research in this field. Four key themes are highlighted: (1) Understanding the Multimedia Environment for Learning; (2) Designing Multimedia Applications for Learning; (3) New Approaches to Storybook Reading; (4) Multimedia Applications in Classroom Instruction. Chapters are written in jargon-free language intended to be accessible to an international audience of researchers, policymakers, program developers, and media specialists.The book is appropriate for university courses about literacy and information technology and will be essential to the numerous professionals interested in early literacy and early interventions.

Table of Contents:

@contents: Selected Contents

Table of Contents

1. Introduction – Adriana Bus and Susan B. Neuman

Part I. Understanding the Multimedia Environment for Learning

2. Children and the Media—Ellen Wartella

3. Digital Beginnings: Young children’s Use of Popular Culture, Media and New Technologies-Jackie Marsh

4. A Theory of Synergy- Susan B. Neuman

Part II. Designing Multimedia Applications for Learning

5. eBooks as Learning Objects in an Online World – Kathleen Roskos

6. A New Look at an Old Format: Eye Tracking Studies of Shared Book Reading and the Implications for E-Books and E-book Research—Evans

7. Learning from Interactive Vocabulary books in Kindergarten: Looking back, Looking Forward—Segers

8. Progress in Understanding the Uses of Multimedia for Struggling Readers—Van Daal

9. Old and new media in the lives of young bilingual children at risk: effects on first and second language learning--Paul P.M. Leseman & Aziza Y. Mayo

Part III. New Approaches to Storybook Reading

10. How multimedia representations contribute to a literate mind for second language learners – Adriana Bus Maria de Jong & Marian Verhallen (Leiden University, Netherlands)

11. The Educational Electronic Book as a Tool for Supporting Children’s Emergent Literacy – Adina Shamir & Ofra Korat (Bar Ilan University, Israel)

12. Effects of multimedia stories on literacy development for early English language learners – Yuuko Uchikoshi (University of California, US)

13."Let's do the computer story again, Nana": A Case Study of how a two-year-old and his grandmother shared thinking spaces during Multiple Shared Readings of an Electronic Story, Linda Laboo

Part IV: Multimedia Applications in Classroom Instruction

14. Development and evaluation of a multimedia Success for All reading program – Chambers, Slavin, & Madden (John Hopkins University, U15. US)

15. Use of Electronic Storybooks in Reading Instruction: From Theory to Practice – Michael McKenna (Georgia Southern University, US)

16. Computer-Assisted Tutoring: Two Studies of Reading Outcomes in First Grade Classrooms—Chambers et al.

17. Using multimedia to promoting early literacy – Schleifer, Levin, Shilton, Freund, & Levin (University of Tel Aviv, Israel)

Part V: Summary and Conclusions

18. Summary and Conclusions: Where do we go from here? – Adriana Bus & Susan B. Neuman

"The book’s structure facilitates reader engagement and reader access to the broader picture...This book will strongly appeal to scholars, classroom practitioners and the wider education community."--Marie Martin, British Journal of Educational Technology 2009, Vol 40: No 6, 1142-1143

Jan Turbill, University of Wollongong, Australia. I have read through the files you sent and I think this is an important book. There is little research published in this area for Early Childhood. One of the huge problems I find is that teachers don’t quite know how to organise their classrooms for using multimedia for young children. I believe this book will help them do this.

Guy Merchant, Sheffield University, U.K. This is an interesting and original proposal which will certainly fill a gap in the market. To the best of my knowledge there is no direct competition, although Unsworth, Thomas, Simpson and Asha (2005) cover similar ground, and Mackey (2002) addresses a number of the themes outlined. [This book] promises to bring a range of interesting work to the attention of a wider audience. It includes up-to-date knowledge within quite a narrowly proscribed aspect of multimedia education. The proposed volume could be strengthened by a clearer exploration of what is meant by ‘storybook reading’ and ‘multimedia’, and by the inclusion of a broader range of research approaches.

This volume would be of interest to academics and researchers involved in literacy in its broader sense as well as those specialising in new media (or ICT) and education. As a result of this there would be considerable interest amongst masters and doctoral students. I would anticipate that there would also be some interest amongst teacher educators and librarians.In the UK, this book would appeal to students following Masters programmes in Literacy and in Children’s Literature. As an institution running the former sort of programme we would invest in library copies, but would not adopt the book as a course reader, although it would feature on recommended booklists.

I recommend that this book should be published, but suggest that the editors should consider re-shaping their proposal in order to locate it in current and emerging research areas and paradigms.

Response to reviews: Thank you for the insightful review. Both of us have been traveling, and have needed a few days to catch up. The review raises a number of issues that we’d like to address here.

2. The review asks us to highlight our focus: Clearly, our aim is to examine how multimedia materials may support children’s literacy development. We recognize that the title "New approaches to storybook reading" reflects only one aspect of literacy development—yet in doing so, it provides the coherence and consistency that may edited books traditionally lack. We would be open to a broader title, such as "New approaches to literacy development: The role of multimedia," if you think appropriate. In either case, our focus is clearly on how multimedia enhances literacy, rather than a broader exploration of multi-media alone.
4. We agree that the Bus chapter was not written as an introductory chapter, but more as a chapter that reviews results from multiple studies conducted in Leiden University. This chapter will fit more appropriately in the middle section of the book, in which multimedia stories on children’s literacy development are discussed. We will write an introductory chapter to explain the focus on this edited volume.
6. We plan to add Section heads to each of the three Sections. Section I, for example, will be titled: Methods for Examining Multimedia and Literacy Development; Section II: The Impact of Multimedia on Children’s Literacy Development, and Section III: Evidence of Effective Multimedia Practices on Literacy Development. Before each set of papers, we will provide a brief introduction, indicating the central points of each section.

We will be delighted to work with Erlbaum to ensure that the volume is coherent, well-written, and provides an important addition to the literature on literacy and multimedia.