Multimedia and Literacy Development

"The book’s structure facilitates reader engagement and reader access to the broader picture...This book will strongly appeal to scholars, classroom practitioners and the wider education community."--Marie Martin, British Journal of Educational Technology 2009, Vol 40: No 6, 1142-1143

Jan Turbill, University of Wollongong, Australia. I have read through the files you sent and I think this is an important book. There is little research published in this area for Early Childhood. One of the huge problems I find is that teachers don’t quite know how to organise their classrooms for using multimedia for young children. I believe this book will help them do this.

Guy Merchant, Sheffield University, U.K. This is an interesting and original proposal which will certainly fill a gap in the market. To the best of my knowledge there is no direct competition, although Unsworth, Thomas, Simpson and Asha (2005) cover similar ground, and Mackey (2002) addresses a number of the themes outlined. [This book] promises to bring a range of interesting work to the attention of a wider audience. It includes up-to-date knowledge within quite a narrowly proscribed aspect of multimedia education. The proposed volume could be strengthened by a clearer exploration of what is meant by ‘storybook reading’ and ‘multimedia’, and by the inclusion of a broader range of research approaches.

This volume would be of interest to academics and researchers involved in literacy in its broader sense as well as those specialising in new media (or ICT) and education. As a result of this there would be considerable interest amongst masters and doctoral students. I would anticipate that there would also be some interest amongst teacher educators and librarians.In the UK, this book would appeal to students following Masters programmes in Literacy and in Children’s Literature. As an institution running the former sort of programme we would invest in library copies, but would not adopt the book as a course reader, although it would feature on recommended booklists.

I recommend that this book should be published, but suggest that the editors should consider re-shaping their proposal in order to locate it in current and emerging research areas and paradigms.

Response to reviews: Thank you for the insightful review. Both of us have been traveling, and have needed a few days to catch up. The review raises a number of issues that we’d like to address here.

2. The review asks us to highlight our focus: Clearly, our aim is to examine how multimedia materials may support children’s literacy development. We recognize that the title "New approaches to storybook reading" reflects only one aspect of literacy development—yet in doing so, it provides the coherence and consistency that may edited books traditionally lack. We would be open to a broader title, such as "New approaches to literacy development: The role of multimedia," if you think appropriate. In either case, our focus is clearly on how multimedia enhances literacy, rather than a broader exploration of multi-media alone.
4. We agree that the Bus chapter was not written as an introductory chapter, but more as a chapter that reviews results from multiple studies conducted in Leiden University. This chapter will fit more appropriately in the middle section of the book, in which multimedia stories on children’s literacy development are discussed. We will write an introductory chapter to explain the focus on this edited volume.
6. We plan to add Section heads to each of the three Sections. Section I, for example, will be titled: Methods for Examining Multimedia and Literacy Development; Section II: The Impact of Multimedia on Children’s Literacy Development, and Section III: Evidence of Effective Multimedia Practices on Literacy Development. Before each set of papers, we will provide a brief introduction, indicating the central points of each section.

We will be delighted to work with Erlbaum to ensure that the volume is coherent, well-written, and provides an important addition to the literature on literacy and multimedia.