2 authors: Gina Biancarosa University of Oregon 49

Ofra Korat has found that presenting children’s books as digital text with dictionaries or activities can lead to improvements in phonological awareness, word-reading skills, and vocabulary knowledge for kindergarten and first-grade readers.

subsequent recognition of words from the
text, as well as their vocabulary.²³

Others have investigated the use of similar

e-reading technology tools to provide practice opportunities and individualized feedback for struggling and impaired readers and found promising results.²⁴ Richard Olson and his colleagues provide further evidence that struggling readers in grades two to five can benefit from programs that provide individu- alized e-reading practice opportunities in story reading, comprehension strategies, and phonological analysis.²⁵ Another strand of research, which has focused on embedding multimedia practice opportunities into
e-reading technology that can be sent home with students, finds that the technology increases children’s, especially at-risk chil- dren’s, practice at home.²⁶ One small-scale study found that children from lower socio- economic backgrounds benefited more from such opportunities than did more-advantaged children and that they made greater gains in both word-recognition skills and vocabulary knowledge, thus suggesting that e-reading technology could be useful for closing both procedural and conceptual skill gaps in literacy.²⁷
Research with somewhat older readers has also found positive results of e-reading technology for a range of reading skills, including fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Jack Mostow and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University
have developed a computer-guided reading tutor that builds readers’ fluency and comprehension using speech-recognition to give spoken and graphical feedback as students read instructional texts aloud.²⁸ They have also found that second-language readers show improvements in fluency and spelling skills comparable to or greater than those obtained with English as a Second Language instruction alone.²⁹ A similar program called Scientific Learning Reading Assistant has also generated evidence that speech-recognition applications within
e-reading programs can improve oral reading fluency skills in second- through fifth-grade readers.³⁰ Finally, a synthesis of the research on e-books, defined as digital texts that mimicked print texts (for example, having pages that turn), has found small positive effects for prekindergarten to fifth-grade students’ comprehension-related outcomes.³¹