E-book as facilitator of vocabulary acquisition: support of adults, dynamic dictionary and static dictionary

We investigated the effects of three facilitators: adults’ support, dynamic visual vocabulary support and static visual vocabulary support on vocabulary acquisition in the context of e-book reading. Participants were 144 Israeli Hebrew-speaking preschoolers (aged 4–6) from middle SES neighborhoods. The entire sample read the e-book without a dictionary once, and was pretested on receptive word comprehension, expressive word explanation and word production in story retelling. The sample was then randomly divided into four groups, each reading an e-book three times, with: (1) adults’ vocabulary support; (2) dynamic visual dictionary support; (3) static visual dictionary support; or (4) without support. The participants were then posttested on the same measures. Children’s progress in all measures was dependent on group, with adults’ support appearing as most effective, dynamic dictionary as second, static dictionary as third, and no support as least effective. However, the gains differed significantly only between some of the groups, but were always significantly different between the group given adults’ support and the control group which was given no support. We conclude that e-books can be used effectively to facilitate word meaning acquisition at different levels. This contribution can be augmented by adults’ support and dynamic dictionary support.

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