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Early literacy skills are crucial predictors of children’s academic success. Dialogic reading—an interactive approach where adults and children engage in discussions about stories—has proven highly effective in developing these skills. However, many families face barriers implementing this practice due to time constraints, limited resources, or linguistic challenges. We present StoryPal, an LLM-powered conversational agent that facilitates dialogic reading through contextual questioning, adaptive scaffolding, and personalized feedback. In a study with 23 children ages 4-7 from diverse socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds, we found high levels of verbal engagement with distinct patterns between English-dominant and bilingual children. The system’s dynamic scaffolding effectively supported struggling readers while challenging proficient ones. Parents valued StoryPal as a supplementary tool that maintained children’s reading engagement when they were unavailable, but emphasized that it should not replace parent-child interactions. Our findings demonstrate the potential of LLM-powered agents to support dialogic reading by adhering to established educational practices. 

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.