Interactive Digital Book Reading in Families with Refugee Backgrounds

ABSTRACT

Abundant research has explored interactive book reading and children’s literacy learning, but little is known about interactive digital book reading among families with refugee backgrounds. Drawing upon theoretical perspectives on social semiotics multimodality, this study investigates what happens when parents and children with a refugee background read digital children’s books multimodally. Data sources include ethnographic interviews, video recordings of family conversations, artifacts, and descriptive field notes based on observations. The findings present three common themes: selecting books, meaning making through semiotic resources, and discussing and learning in two languages. Implications include the importance of valuing digital multimodal and dual-language children’s books and acknowledging multiple interactions among parents, siblings, and young children of families with refugee backgrounds.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• families with refugee backgrounds
• interactive digital book reading
• multimodality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This study uses the term “with refugee backgrounds” rather than “refugee,” which “represents only one aspect of a student’s identity and can carry negative connotations” (Shapiro & MacDonald, 2017, p. 11).