Choosing books for beginning readers: Sometimes less is more
© 2022 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved
The most helpful books for beginning readers keep fancy details to a minimum, and this applies to imagery every bit well as to text. "Decorated" illustrations can be distracting, and interfere with a young child's reading comprehension.
Books designed for new and emerging readers are sometimes very exciting to look at. The text is supported past eye-communicable, colorful, highly-detailed illustrations. The ameliorate to entice your child to read, right?
But reading is a cognitively demanding activity — especially for children who are just commencement to hone their skills. And research suggests that some illustrations are too interesting — too detailed and distracting. They divert attending away from the text, and make it harder for kids to concentrate on the key tasks of reading.
In fact, there'south bear witness that young schoolhouse children end upwards comprehending less of a text if it'south accompanied by overly-detailed images.
To understand how this works, consider all the feats that young readers must perform.
- They must recognize the letters on the page, and translate them into sounds.
- They must string together the component sounds to "sound out" a spoken discussion.
- Then they need to identify the meaning of this word, and keep it bachelor in short-term retentivity while they proceed to decode the next word.
- When they've finished decoding all the words in a sentence, they need to exist able to replay these words, in sequence, in their minds. They need to understand the grammar of the judgement. They need to grasp the overall meaning of the text.
What if the judgement is as well long? Or one of the words is especially hard to decode? This entire process depends critically on a child's working memory capacity.
We can only pay attention to and so much at once. There are limits to how much information nosotros can keep active and available for united states of america to call up almost at any given fourth dimension.
Then if a judgement is too long, a child volition likely lose track. Past the time she decodes the last word in a sentence, she volition have forgotten the first discussion.
Likewise, if there is as well much new information to absorb, or a particularly catchy word to decode, the developing reader may get stalled.
Eventually, as the reader gains experience and skill, he'll be able to handle more complication. He'll accept learned to recognize many words automatically, by sight. He'll automatically decode certain prefixes, suffixes, and word roots. He'll have an intuition for spelling conventions, and common grammatical patterns. And these shortcuts will lighten the cognitive load of reading — freeing up working memory for tackling longer sentences, and more complicated linguistic communication.
But when the reader is starting out — commencement learning to read, or building early literacy skills — information technology doesn't have much to exceed his or her working memory capacity. Every aspect of reading requires conscious attention and effort. Then it'south important to keep things pretty simple.
Of grade, that's why books for beginning readers feature simple language, like "Sam sat on a mat." Merely what nigh other elements of a book? What about the illustrations? Can the pictures in a book contribute to data overload?
That'southward what Cassondra Eng and her colleagues wanted to know, so they devised an experiment with sixty school children (in grades i and 2).
To brainstorm, the researchers took a commercially-available motion picture book designed for early readers, and they modified it.
- On some of the volume's pages, the original illustrations were left untouched. These illustrations were rich with information, and included many details not directly relevant to the story.
- On other pages, the illustrations were simplified. The researchers removed extraneous details, leaving just the bare essentials.
What did this look similar? Hither's an example provided by the researchers. It isn't from the specific book used in the experiment, but it gives you an idea of how much a "standard" page differed from a simplified, visually "streamlined" one.
Once the researchers had prepared the reading materials, they were fix for the big test.
Each child read both types of pages, out loud. And as children read, a portable eye-tracker recorded the movements of their eyes — allowing the researchers to decide how much attending kids paid to the illustrations, and how much attention they paid to the text.
When kids had finished reading, they were asked a series of reading comprehension questions.
How did things turn out?
When kids were reading the original, unmodified pages, they spent more fourth dimension shifting their gaze away from the text. They also spent more time looking at inapplicable details in the illustrations. And both of these tendencies were associated with lower reading comprehension.
In fact, the difference in reading comprehension was substantial, with kids scoring approximately 33% higher in comprehension in the visually "streamlined" condition.
And some kids benefited more others. They were specially distracted by the standard pages. So switching to simplified, streamlined imagery had a bigger affect on their reading comprehension.
What should we take away from this?
Nosotros shouldn't assume that content-rich imagery is always a bad thing for reading comprehension.
In fact, previous inquiry suggests that older kids aren't fazed much by the images that accompany text. A study of quaternary graders found that kids focused primarily on the text, and relatively little on pictures (Hannus and Hyönä 1999).
Simply this study suggests that younger, beginning readers are more easily distracted. And it makes sense given what we know about the many tasks that a beginning reader must perform to decode the text.
First readers have more to juggle, more than to things to consciously go along rail of. No wonder if they are more easily derailed by engaging, entertaining visuals.
This study is also consistent with previous research.
For example, when researchers compared traditional, print books with digital, touch-screen books, they found that 7-twelvemonth-old children showed higher levels of reading comprehension when they read the traditional impress books (Ross et al 2016).
And other studies indicate that certain interactive features of digital storybooks (like games, "hotspots," and groundwork noises) can distract kids from learning words (Sari et al 2019; Motorcoach et al 2015).
So when information technology comes to beginning readers, less is unremarkably more. Books with simple, minimalist illustrations tin can assistance kids focus — and better understand what they are reading.
References: Books for beginning readers
Bus AG, Takacs ZK, and Kegel CA. 2015. Affordances and limitations of electronic storybooks for young children'due south emergent literacy. Developmental Review 35: 79-97.
Eng, C., Godwin, K., & Fisher, A. (in press). Keep It Unproblematic: Streamlining Book Illustrations Improves Attention and Comprehension in Beginning Readers. Nature Science of Learning 5 (article number 14).
Hannus 1000 and Hyönä J. 1999. Utilization of illustrations during learning of science textbook passages among low- and loftier-ability children. Contemp. Educ. Psychol. 24: 95–123.
Ross KM, Pye RE, Randell J. 2016. Reading Impact Screen Storybooks with Mothers Negatively Affects vii-Year-Old Readers' Comprehension simply Enriches Emotional Engagement. Front Psychol. 2022 Nov sixteen;7:1728.
Sarı B, Başal HA, Takacs ZK, Motorbus AG. 2019. A randomized controlled trial to test efficacy of digital enhancements of storybooks in support of narrative comprehension and discussion learning. J Exp Child Psychol. 179:212-226.
Title image of girl reading by Skolova / shutterstock
Paradigm of the experimental pages is from the newspaper by Eng et al 2020, and published under the opens in a new windowCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Content last modified 10/2020
Source: https://parentingscience.com/choosing-books-for-beginning-readers/
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