Motivation of Parents Towards Reading Multilingual eBooks To Pre-School Children

Motivation of Parents Towards Reading Multilingual eBooks To Pre-School Children

mobile learning

school-home cooperation

multilingual

eBook

The use of mobile devices for language learning, under the Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) has been found to motivate children to read digital print. However, parents need to be convinced of the benefits of this new technology-assisted learning method within a multilingual learning context. A case study was conducted to propose a MALL framework in which educators and parents created a shared meaningful learning environment to develop the children’s emergent multilingual literacy skills, using mobile devices installed with interactive multilingual eBooks. This paper reports the findings, specifically on the parents’ attitude and motivation towards reading multilingual eBooks with their children. A group of 25 multi-ethnic families, together with their 5-year-old children participated in this study. A mixed-method explanatory research design obtained parent's attitude and motivation from a questionnaire, interview, and feedback form. The results show a high level of parents’ acceptance toward reading eBook with their children. Parents attributed their positive attitude and motivation towards MALL to the use of the multimedia, multilingual, and mobile platform. The MALL framework was also found to encourage parents and other adults to scaffold the children’s multilingual skills development. However, there were also setbacks toward the use of eBook as some parents expressed a stronger preference for printed books and were concerned with health issues associated with the children’s eBook use. Areas for improvements and future research are also made in this paper.

See, Kwee Teck

Madhubala, Bava Harji

Koo, Ah Choo

International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM); Vol. 13 No. 01 (2019); pp. 20-36

1865-7923

International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE), Vienna, Austria

2019-01-29

Copyright (c) 2019 Kwee Teck See, Bava Harji Madhubala, Ah Choo Koo

application/pdf

eng

info:eu-repo/semantics/article

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Peer-reviewed Article