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Conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly prevalent in children’s lives, serving as educational companions, particularly in shared reading activities. While effective for monolingual children’s learning, there exists a gap in meeting the unique needs of the rapidly expanding bilingual child population, who face dual challenges of school readiness and heritage language maintenance. Moreover, most current CAs, designed for one-to-one interactions with children, neglect the importance of parents’ active participation in shared reading. Our study introduces the development and home deployment of a bilingual CA, integrated within e-books, designed to foster parent-child joint engagement in shared reading, thereby promoting children’s bilingual language development. Results of the study indicated high levels of family engagement in co-reading activities over an extended period, with observable language learning gains in children. This study provides valuable design implications for designing effective and engaging CAs for bilingual families.
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“It’s All About the Pictures:” Understanding How Parents/Guardians With Visual Impairments Co-Read With Their Child(ren)
Co-reading, an activity where adults collaboratively read books with child(ren), is important for literacy learning and forming human connection. However, parents and guardians with visual impairments do not experience the same level of access to resources when co-reading with their child(ren) as their sighted counterparts, especially as regards images in children’s books. Through conducting an interview study with five visually impaired parents/guardians, we illuminate the importance parents place on images in children’s books, how they access visual information in children’s print books, and the potential of smart speakers in assisting their existing co-reading practices.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2048145
- PAR ID:
- 10522059
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400702204
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 4
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- New York NY USA
- 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/10.1145/3597638.3614488
