Purpose: A common goal of peer-mediated interventions is to train peers to successfully initiate and maintain social and linguistic interactions with a target child in the classroom. Ample evidence indicates that peer-mediated interventions improve social and linguistic outcomes for students in the primary and later grades with developmental…

Louise Rosenblatt's well-known concept of stance distinguishes between efferent reading (reading to take something away from the text) and aesthetic reading (reading for the experience of dwelling in the text). This article proposes a refinement to this binary, adding the concept of afferent reading. Afference, in biology, means a bringing-to, and…

Numerous studies have examined the positive and negative effects of various types of interactions that occur while children view electronic book (e-book) stories. However, the effects of the different types of interactions have not been compared, and more importantly, the optimal amount and reoccurrence of these interactions on children has not…

Children's literature in the form of picturebooks, storybooks, and anthologies/readers in Pre-Kindergarten (PreK) to Grade 3 holds a special place in literacy development and in the lives of children. While reading children's literature, developing readers navigate between words and images to form meaning as they read. Although studies in many…

In early education, reading difficulties can lead to negative outcomes. Augmented reality (AR) storybooks combine the benefits of e-books and print books, significantly aiding children's reading skills and gaining recognition from scholars and educators. However, the existing AR storybooks often overlook the design of interactive features, which…

Focalization is such an intrinsic component of narrative that readers are often unaware of its effect. With internal focalization, an actor within the story narrates the events from their vantage point, flavoring the story with their perspective. While extant research demonstrates that many features of narrative structure influence how readers…

The purpose of this study was to examine the outcomes of a home-based, repeated reading intervention in which texts are matched to children's school-based instructional reading level. Results indicated that across the five cases, improvements were evident in reading accuracy, rate, and fluency for the take-home texts and all participants'…

Background: Rapid growth in early childhood device usage has raised critical questions about the potential impact of digital storybooks on children's reading outcomes. The current study examined how two types of multimedia animations in digital storybooks -- animations of storyline elements or details in the illustrations -- influenced the story…

Reading engagement is an essential component of children's reading achievement. This three-chapter dissertation considers a new approach to conceptualizing reading engagement through the lens of children's immersion, or absorption, in a text. Chapter 1 examines the theoretical underpinnings of story world absorption, sometimes known as…

We examined knowledge-based inference in 6-, 8- and 10-year-olds. Participants listened to texts where the number of clues for an inference was manipulated and then judged whether single-word probes (target inference, competing inference, literal word from the text and an unrelated concept) were related to the story. Accuracy and response times…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the duration of students' augmented reality (AR) experience on reading comprehension and cognitive load in reading activities carried out with an augmented reality storybook. The participants are 134 secondary school students aged between 11 and 12 attending a school in Antalya. They were…

The aim of this pilot study was to examine the immediate and long-term effects of an intervention program that aims to improve preschoolers' (N = 36, M = 4.49 years, SD = 0.35) early numeracy skills by combining the learning of numerical relational skills via story reading with fundamental motor skill practice. The intervention program was piloted…

Fostering English reading interest and engagement among young learners in non-native settings demands innovative strategies. Previous studies emphasized the role of teachers in enhancing reading interest, for example, through dialogic reading due to its interactive nature. However, this approach is challenging to implement on a large scale.…

This research report is on fostering young children's metacognitive skills. The study was conducted at a private early childhood education center in a Midwestern city in the United States in 2020. The design of the study was a mixed approach including Time Series experimentation, naturalistic observation, and interviews. Children aged 3-4 years…

Public library storytimes provide rich learning opportunities for young children and their caregivers, yet little is known about how inclusive they are for children with disabilities and developmental delays (CwD/DD). The purpose of this study was to identify and describe ways that librarians support the inclusion of CwD/DD and their caregivers in…