Electronic story book display method and kindergartener reading behavior: An eye-tracking investigation

If children could be enticed to pay more attention to the print area, it could help increase their print awareness and future reading ability. Along with the development of electronic technology, many books have changed to the electronic format, and storybooks are no exception. The purpose of this study was to understand which electronic storybook display method is best able to increase children’s attention to the print area. To this end, we modified the electronic storybook’s design and used an eye-tracker to measure children’s visual attention during reading. The study included 76 children between the ages of 4–6 from two northern Taiwanese kindergartens. The kindergarteners were split into three groups: a traditional storybook group, the highlight synchronization group (implicit instruction), and the text-discussion group (explicit instruction). This study was conducted over a 6-week period: one week for pre-tests, four weeks of interventions, and one week for post-tests. The result of pre-test suggested that the northern Taiwanese children spent about 80% of their time looking at the picture area, and about 20% at the print area. The result of week 2, the first week of the intervention stage, showed that, when it came to visual attention invested in the print area, the highlight synchronization groups paid significantly more attention to the print area than the traditional storybook group.