International Perspectives on Digital Media and Early Literacy

International Perspectives on Digital Media and Early Literacy evaluates the use and impact of digital devices for social interaction, language acquisition, and early literacy. It explores the role of interactive mediation as a tool for using digital media and provides empirical examples of best practice for digital media targeting language teaching and learning. The book brings together a range of international contributions and discusses the increasing trend of digitalization as an additional resource in early childhood literacy. It provides a broad insight into current research on the potential of digital media in inclusive settings by integrating multiple perspectives from different scientific fields: (psycho)linguistics, cognitive science, language didactics, developmental psychology, technology development, and human-machine interaction. Drawing on a large body of research, it shows that crucial early experiences in communication and social learning are the basis for later academic skills. The book is structured to display children's first developmental steps in learning in interaction with digital media and highlight various domains of early digital media use in family, kindergarten, and primary schools. This book will appeal to practitioners, academics, researchers, and students with an interest in early education, literacy education, digital education, the sociology of digital culture and social interaction, school reform, and teacher education.

Katharina J. Rohlfing is Professor of Psycholinguistics at Paderborn University, Germany. Claudia Müller-Brauers is Professor for German Didactics at the Leibniz University Hannover, Germany.

Part 1. Learning and interaction with digital devices. 1.Promising interactive functions in digital storybooks for young children. 2.Cognitively activating and emotionally attuning interactions: Their relevance for language and literacy learning and teaching with digital media. 3.Exploring Media Practices in Inclusive Early Childhood Settings. 4. The caregiver's role in keeping a child-robot interaction going. 5. Beyond words: Children's multimodal responses during word learning with a social robot. Part 2. (Early) Literacy learning with digital media. 6. Promising interactive functions in digital storybooks for young children. 7. A look into the future: How digital tools may advance language development. 8. Designing apps to facilitate first and second language acquisition in children. 9. Digital children's literature in the interplay between visuality and animation: A model for analyzing picture book apps and their potential for children's story comprehension, 10. DAZonline.ch: A gallery of annotated interactive pictures for cross-situational language learning.