Literacy Education in the Digital Age

Beginning readers in the early 21st century have unprecedented access to digital books and reading materials that provide them, and the adults supporting them, with many opportunities as well as many challenges. In the present chapter, we consider children’s early literacy experiences in a digital world. We review research on the influence of digital texts on early reading and explore how digital technologies are being integrated into educational literacy practices, both in the preschool and school age years. The success of this integration necessitates attention to multiple parts of the educational ecosystem, from individual learners to educators, and through to local and national educational policy.

Parents, caregivers and educators are presented with complexities "in integrating digital and print literacy into children’s early reading experiences. There are commonalities between these two forms; for example to read via both modalities, children need to acquire the basic skills of letter-sound decoding and learn to link the resultant word forms to meaning. There are also key differences with, as a primary example, the increased multimodality of digital books, which makes reading a far less linear experience. For adults who have learned to read via print books and for educators who have learned to teach reading via print books, this shift creates a scenario where adults, as reading ‘experts’, do not necessarily have all the answers yet, in terms of how to best foster the resulting ‘multi-literacies’ that children must learn." (Mifsud & Petrova, 2018; p. 177).