E-books.

I read this article given to us by our lecturer. I found it quite insightful…So, I decided to BLOG about it by doing an overview of said article.

An overview of the article “Using E-Books to Promote Vocabulary Development”
Higgins, Norman and Laura Hess

“The effectiveness of any instructional program depends on how it is used, for what purpose it is used, and with whom it is used.” (Higgins, Norman and Hess)
This statement is fitting especially when it comes to the use of e-books. “Most electronic books can read whole stories, phrases and individual words aloud”. Many of these e-books have “added multimedia enhancements...to promote reading achievement”.

Several investigators have sought to compare the effects of print and e-books on reading achievement. Matthew 1997 reported that “children who read...electronic books performed significantly better on story retelling than a matched group who read printed books, but there were no differences...on a story comprehension test.”
Lipson and Wixson (1996) provide guidelines for promoting vocabulary development, which includes:

• relate an unfamiliar word to a known synonym
• use the unfamiliar word in a different context, and
• ask the reader to define the unfamiliar word in his/her own words

It remains to be seen if these guidelines can be implemented with e-books as well as the effects of doing so.
The authors used these guidelines in their study in conjunction with “the animation features of e-books” to determine the effectiveness of selected vocabulary-building activities on learning and retention of unfamiliar words.

To conduct the investigation the authors used a third-grade class of 10 boys and 12 girls. 6 boys and 5 girls in the control group and 4 boys and 7 girls in the experimental group using “The New Kid on the Block: Poems by Jack Prelutsky” (1993).

Results of the investigation.
The results confirm the effectiveness of supplemental vocabulary instruction together with the animations in an e-book yet the author question their practicality and efficiency. They concluded that the supplemental activities are not difficult to implement and the efficiency could be improved if the same results would be attained when the adult worked with more than one child at a time. Further research must be done on the correlation between effectiveness of activities and number of children participating at the same time.