The message for readers of all ages is clear: reading medium matters. Adult readers demand to be more than critically enlightened of the choices and reading strategies they use with the unlike reading media available to them. In this post, Natalia Kucirkova explains why emergent or immature readers demand to be provided with high-quality print and digital books, and optimal ways for their use at home or schools. Natalia Kucirkova is Professor of Early Babyhood Teaching and Evolution at the University of Stavanger, Norway and Senior Research Beau at the University College London, UK. Natalia's research concerns ways of supporting children's volume reading, digital literacy and exploring the role of personalisation in early years. She co-edits the Bloomsbury Book Series Children's Reading and Writing on Screen and the journal Literacy published by Wiley. She leads the International Commonage of Research and Pattern in Children's Digital Books.

In her recently published volume Reader Come Home, Professor Maryanne Wolf cautions against screens taking over reading on paper. She calls readers to return to the deep reading processes activated when reading on paper and in particular for high-quality, long texts. Professor Wolf is an authority in reading enquiry and currently acts every bit the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice in the USA. In her book she has mobilised an impressive body of evidence to highlight how screens affect the reading process. She is worried that the more than nosotros read short automated texts on screen, the more than our reading shifts towards skimming. This ways that nosotros will be less able to read long literary texts and benefit from the cognitive processes that deep reading affords. Wolf zooms in on the "deep reading" processes that, in her definition, consist of internalised knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Wolf's main argument is that these processes are threatened by the digital medium of reading, notably interactive touchscreens, with distracting hyperlinks.

There is no doubt that reading matters a great deal. To be able to read is to exist able to fully participate in the modern order and lead a meaningful life. Pedagogy children to read and savor books is the chief goal of early on babyhood education. International reading/literacy organisations (due east.grand. Book Trust), promote the love of reading even before children are born (e.g. Bookstart Bump, read to your crash-land). For decades, reading researchers have identified barriers to reading and means of counteracting them. Traditional risk factors include express admission to books at home, or a poor habitation learning environment. A recent risk factor are screens: tablets, smartphones, video consoles and other modern technologies.

There is a business organization in some quarters that children's activities with screens will supervene upon their reading of books. There is a business that the habit of skimming digital texts will carry over to reading on paper. These are valid concerns merely they are non substantiated past research and they omit the important function of context and private readers in driving alter. Clearly, positioning newspaper books as superior to digital books offers a more convenient explanation than turning the mirror towards ourselves. Screens were cited as the reason for Us teens' declined interest in reading simply as Jordan Shapiro bluntly puts it: "…it is easier to frame the story as paper vs. digital. It gives u.s. permission not to engage with our kids. We tin can blame the video games and apps rather than blaming ourselves."

At that place are many experimental studies that compared reading on paper versus reading on screen and found a difference in readers' functioning. Two meta-analyses summarised the evidence for adult readers (Clinton, 2019 and Delgado et al., 2018) simply did non provide explanations for why the departure occurs. At that place could exist a departure because of the way gains were measured (methodological reasons) and/or because of how gains were defined (theoretical reasons). Clinton's meta-assay provides some explanation in that it compares fictional and expository texts and detects a negative outcome on reading performance for expository texts but. She reflects on the deviation and suggests "contextual cue" equally a possible reason for unlike reading performance with reading expository texts on screen. The readers' awareness of how they read on screen (and the calibration process they appoint in when reading on screen), might be the sources of the impress-versus-screen difference, Clinton suggests. This process is chosen meta-knowledge and information technology influences your impressions of how much you understood the text you read, how much you lot focused on the text, whether you skimmed it or not and many other factors. The calibration process is not dependent on the digital medium but on the readers' preference: if yous prefer to read this blog printed out on a piece of paper, your sensation of reading on a screen is influenced by this preference.

The chain of influences is an essential piece of agreement for the debates on reading on and off-screen. It is a continuation of a long argument in media studies where one campsite of researchers focuses on metacognition and another campsite of researchers on the inherent characteristics of the medium. Intentionally or not, Wolf follows in footsteps of Herbert Marshall McLuhan, a communication theorist famous in the 1960s, who represents the "medium is the bulletin" military camp. In his early on writings, McLuhen insisted on the causalities and effects inherent in technologies. In his after writings, McLuhan extended his concern with the digital medium to the trends observable in the modern society such equally heightened individualism, nationalism and their threat to democracy. In Reader Come Dwelling house, Wolf expands her concern effectually time spent on screens to wider concerns.

I am not at home with this concern (forgive the pun). To me, Wolf'south engaging writing style makes for enjoyable reading, and the volume'due south availability as a Kindle and paperback gives me a choice to enjoy information technology in a format of my preference. In my review of her book, I applaud Wolf's attempt to present a clear case on why the concerns around reading on screen need to be addressed by researchers, communities and policy-makers. I suggest giving more vocalism to research that focuses on features that are present in both print and digital reading, such as interactivity, materiality or personalisation. I also highlight the interplay of content and format in affecting children'south story comprehension and caution that the privileged status of written stories for developing children'south empathy has not been confirmed by research all the same.

The 'abode' that Wolf invites readers to, will exist invariably different for different readers. The screen introduced hyperlinks, large collections of east-books, automatic possibility for translation, multimedia representations of meaning. Despite many gloomy predictions, the presence of children'south e-books and story apps generated a surge of interest in children'southward print books. Contempo research by the National Literacy Trust in the UK shows that information technology is not the reading medium merely readers' motivation that explains their reading habits: skilled readers read a lot and well both on newspaper and screen.

It seems to me that before we write the new digital paths off, we need to explore them in more depth. Children and adults have different experiences with screen media. With immature children, information technology is parents' attitudes towards children's e-books that mediate their admission of books and length of time they spend with them (mayhap non surprisingly parents of youngest children prefer print books). For children born afterwards 2010, seeing their family members reading on screen is every bit common, if not more common, than reading on paper. Their commencement encounter with stories, written, audio, visual and multimedia, happens every bit much with as without screens. These children are less aware of the disconnect between a digital and non-digital reading medium than any generation of children before them. It follows that they have different preferences, different resources for scale, dissimilar lived examples of reading around them. Given the widely reported low quality of children's east-books, our research grouping focuses on maximising the learning opportunities with digital books and encouraging more and loftier-quality reading in local languages.

Without a doubt, readers volition not be able to bask new reading adventures if they practise not have a solid foundation. Just as for how and where the reading adventures accept us, there are courses for horses: different books work for different readers. The 'habitation sugariness home' for reading in the digital age is the provision of, and the exercise in the employ, of high-quality texts on and off screen.

This post gives the views of the authors and does not correspond the position of the LSE Parenting for a Digital Hereafter blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Scientific discipline.