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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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"It's an independent living skill, but covered with fun!": Prompting At-Home Skill Development for Children with Vision Impairment
This study examined how to design tools that build independence with Blind or Visually Impaired (BVI) children and their families. Beyond core academics, BVI children require instruction on independent living skills, with their curriculum necessitating parent-school cooperation to support continued education at home. However, most technology for BVI children focus on academics, spatial orientation, and physical mobility. In this work, we aim to design a tool for independence that aligns with existing familial structures and activities. Through interviews and diary studies with five families, we explored development practices parents used with their BVI children, parent-teacher relationships, and how a prompting and reflection tool supported family goals. This study highlights home routines and independence skills that benefit from customized prompting, how activity prompts can encourage parents to scale back their assistance and propel independence, and how reflection builds optimism and empowers parents in the learning process.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1652907
- PAR ID:
- 10649296
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- 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/10.1145/3663548.3675626
