Availability and quality of storybook apps across five less widely used languages

Abstract

Traditionally, paper has been the main source for joint storybook reading experiences, but with new digital technologies we now have other opportunities for the mediation of narratives, increasingly in the form of downloadable apps on mobile phones and tablets. Now that more than a million apps are available, among which many educational apps, an important question is to what extent storybook apps are part of this supply of apps. There is strong evidence that, in particular, narratives as a main source of information in storybooks can boost children’s development: apart from narrative comprehension children may learn sophisticated words and expressions that are less common in daily conversation (e.g. Montag, Jones and Smith 2015) and familiarize themselves with less common grammar (e.g. Wagner 2013). To develop these basic skills, it is vital that children encounter narratives and narrative discourse from a very young age and receive guidance to ensure they learn from this experience. Therefore, a main aim of this chapter is to describe the availability and accessibility of digital books for children aged 0–8 years with narration as a main source of information. Given that parents still prefer paper to digital for book-sharing with their child (van Coillie and Raedts 2016), parents may be more inclined to download games or films instead of book-like narrative apps for their children to use when interacting with new media. As digital devices and the Internet are widely available to children, and children spend increasingly more time with digital devices, digital books may offer new intensive opportunities for literary experiences from an early age. Apart from the aim of getting more of a sense of the availability of digital books for young children, in our content analysis we tested whether the availability of storybook apps varies across less widely used languages. All children need to come into contact with their mother tongue in what is a crucial phase in their language learning. However, across countries, children may not have access to digital stories in their mother tongue to the same extent as to those produced in English. In less wealthy countries, tablets and Smartphones are less common and this may create a digital divide between countries (Warschauer 2003). At the outset of our review, we suspected that there are far fewer narrative apps for children in less widely used languages than in global languages such as English, and that a good and competitive offer in the smaller languages is lacking. For instance, in a status report on Norwegian languages, the Language Council of Norway displays a deep concern for children’s decreasing use and knowledge of the mother tongue, due to the overwhelming use of English in media (Språkrådet 2017). The report shows that only three out of ten children under the age of 11 encounter Norwegian languages when they watch videos on YouTube or play computer games.