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with the purpose motivating Arabic children to read for pleasure. The 'fun sorter' was
used to canvas the opinions of the 18 children regarding the different reading
interventions including 'Trees of Tales'. Participants indicated that they enjoyed
reading from 'Trees of Tales' more than the e-book or the printed books. They
revealed that the stories included in 'Trees of Tales' were more interesting than the
stories in the printed books. However, the children found 'Trees of Tales' the most
difficult to use out of the three interventions. The preliminary results indicate that
'Trees of Tales' has a positive impact on Arabic children's reading behaviour.
Overall, this experiment shows that using technology such as tablet PCs for
pleasurable reading offered children more enjoyment than the existing reading media
in schools such as printed books. Although there was no significant difference in
perceived fun and best content between the non-interactive e-book stories and 'Trees
of Tales', the children indicated that they would read 'Trees of Tales' again, which
supported our suspicion that interactive media has an advantage over the static media
in this case.
Obviously, the analysis of children 'reported' experiences, needs to be connected
with the 'observed' situations to complete the picture and develop a conclusion on the
effectiveness of 'Trees of Tales' [18]. Additionally, the collected data raised questions
about the specific features of 'Trees of Tales' that children enjoyed the most or found
difficult, which calls for a further investigation of the video recordings that were
conducted during the experiment. Future work will include analysis of the
observational data collected in the reading sessions.
References
1. Al-Yacoub, I.: Sum of All Fears: Arabs read an average of 6 pages a year, study reveals
(2012), http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/07/
14/226290.html (retrieved)
2. Beauchat, K.A., Blamey, K.L., Walpole, S.: Building preschool children's language and
literacy one storybook at a time. Reading Teacher 63, 26-39 (2009)
3. Blythe, M.A., Monk, A.F., Overbeeke, K., Wright, P.C.: Funology: From Usability to
Enjoyment. Kluwer Academic Publishers (2006)
4. Breakwell, G.M., Hammond, S., Fife-Schaw, C.: Research methods in psychology. SAGE,
London (2000)
5. Chiong, C., Ree, J., Takeuchi, L., Erickson: Print Books vs. E-books: Comparing parent-
child co-reading on print, basic, and enhanced e-book platforms. The Joan Ganz Cooney
Center at Sesame Workshop, New York (2012)
6. Clark, C., Rumbold, K.: Reading for Pleasure: A research overview, vol. 30. National
Literacy Trust, London (2006)
7. Cox, K.E., Guthrie, J.T.: Motivational and Cognitive Contributions to Students' amount of
Reading. Contemporary Educational Psychology 26, 116-131 (2001)
8. Foley, H.: Counterbalancing. In: Lewis-Beck, M.S., Bryman, A., Liao, T.F. (eds.) The
SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods, pp. 206-207. Sage
Publications, Thousand Oaks (2004),
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412950589.n180
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