An educational, personalized electronic book called You Are in the Story (YAITS) is evaluated to assess its effectiveness on reading comprehension and motivation on sixth grade EFL students in a state secondary school in Turkey. The study was conducted with 48 students (aged 11-12) that included reading comprehension scores and reading motivation scores. Results indicated that reading comprehension scores showed no significant difference between groups. YAITS considerably led to superior reading motivation scores compared to the printed guided reading control group. Personalized e-book reading had a positive influence on the internal reading motivation of the learners. Participant students claimed that they preferred to read in their free time the printed version of the books because of the sense of ownership that the printed text storybooks offered.
TopIntroduction
The use of computers and electronic devices for reading for personal and educational purposes has gone up significantly in the recent years. This change is mostly caused by the digital revolution, which is also changing the world of education. Especially in the last two decades the use of digital children’s books has become a multidisciplinary and methodologically diverse interest of study, with a focus on qualitative or quantitative research techniques and books produced commercially or by researchers; however, digital books for children lack a contemporary approach and this situation restricts user experience of the children (Kucirkova, 2019).
According to Kucirkova and Flevitt (2020), “personalized books are digital or print books that have been altered in response to individual readers’ needs and preferences” (p.136). The main purpose of personalized books is to provide children with a chance to be the protagonist of the fictional narratives. Personalized reading systems typically cater to the purpose of teaching children new concepts or supporting their learning with tailored reading experiences (Kucirkova, 2017). According to Kucirkova (2016), there is a wide variety of personalized e-reading elements such as: listening to the story, voice-recording, getting immediate feedback, helping when students do not understand, highlighting text, use of hotspots, reading to the student, and story authorship. Kucirkova (2016) also claims that the child’s name as the main protagonist or other story characters can bear the names of the child’s friends/relatives. Children might interact with the story elements in ways that are peculiar to them such as creating their own avatars and using it as the protagonist of the book. With the help of personalized electronic reading elements, children can experience reading meaningful and enjoyable stories. However, personalized electronic books might have some limitations. Interactive elements that are used in personalized electronic books such as hotspots might interfere with children’s understanding of the story and might result in cognitive overload (Bus et al., 2014). Kucirkova (2017) also does not advise the use of only personalized electronic books for children.
On the other hand, the studies by Bus et al. (2014) and Kucirkova (2010) suggest that children show more interest in the story when they use personalized electronic books. Moreover, Kucirkova (2010) also mentions that personalized information provided improved comprehension with reduced memory load as the learner was building on previous knowledge and the concepts they already knew. Even though personalized reading has been used in reading in English, to our knowledge, there has been no detailed study of the impact of personalized reading on a learner’s reading comprehension and motivation in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context, which this study aims to address.