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Recognizing the challenges bilingual children face in school readiness and the potential of bilingual dialogic shared reading in improving language and literacy, this study investigates the use of a bilingual conversational agent (CA) to enhance shared reading experiences in home environments. While current CAs hold promise in fostering young children's learning, they do not typically consider the linguistic and cultural needs of bilingual children and rarely involve parents intentionally. To this end, we developed a bilingual CA, embedded within ebooks, to support children's language learning and parent engagement for Latine Spanish-English bilingual families. A week-long home-based study with 15 families indicated that the bilingual CA elicited a high level of bilingual verbal engagement from children, thereby promoting their vocabulary acquisition. It also stimulated meaningful conversations among parents and children. This study provides design implications for developing CAs for bilingual children and parents.
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Empowering Families Facing English Literacy Challenges to Jointly Engage in Computer Programming
Research suggests that parental engagement through Joint Media Engagement (JME) is an important factor in children's learning for coding and programming. Unfortunately, parents with limited technology background may have difficulty supporting their children's access to programming. English-language learning (ELL) families from marginalized communities face particular challenges in understanding and supporting programming, as code is primarily authored using English text. We present BlockStudio, a programming tool for empowering ELL families to jointly engage in introductory coding, using an environment embodying two design principles, text-free and visually concrete. We share a case study involving three community centers serving immigrant and refugee populations. Our findings show ELL families can jointly engage in programming without text, via co-creation and flexible roles, and can create a range of artifacts, indicating understanding of aspects of programming within this environment. We conclude with implications for coding together in ELL families and design ideas for text-free programming research.
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- PAR ID:
- 10065795
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 13
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174196
