Reading Between The Pixels: Parent-Child Interaction While Reading Online Storybooks

To examine whether parent-child reading of online storybooks might elicit the same sorts of interaction that have been observed for joint reading of traditional books, an exploratory study was conducted with seven parent-child dyads. Each dyad was observed while reading two online storybooks that presented branching stories that incorporated "choice points" at which readers chose the path that the story would follow. Results indicated that parents and children engaged in many of the same behaviors found in past literature involving traditional storybooks, and that utterances involved similar levels of abstraction. When choice points were reached in the stories, it was typically the preschool children who selected the path that the story would take, either by themselves or with their parents. In this way, children not only saw and heard the stories, but also helped to determine the course of events, with implications for emergent literacy.