Explore the vast range of titles available.

The present study investigates the incremental validity of the traditional books-at-home measure and selected extensions (i.e., number of children's books and number of ebooks) for explaining students' academic achievement as measured by their academic language comprehension. Using multiple linear regressions, we additionally explore the role of the source of information (i.e., whether information is given by parents or children). Based on cross-sectional data of a German sample of 2353 elementary school children from Grades 2 through 4, we found that parents' information on the number of books and children's books contributed to students' academic language comprehension over and above parental occupation and education. Children's information on the number of books did not further increase the amount of explained variance, and the effects were smaller than those for parents' information. Yet, when investigated separately, both parents' and children's information on the number of books and children's books at home predicted students' academic language comprehension and mediated the relationship between more distal structural features of socioeconomic status (i.e., parents' occupational status and education) and the outcome variable. No effect emerged for the number of ebooks. Our findings point to the robustness of the traditional books-at-home measure when used in parent questionnaires. (Orig.).

This is the first study to take a comprehensive look at transnational children's literature in the period before 1900. The chapters examine what we mean by 'children's literature' in this period, as well as what we mean by 'transnational' in the context of children's culture. They investigate who transmitted children's books across borders (authors, illustrators, translators, publishers, teachers, relatives, readers), through what networks the books were spread (commercial, religious, colonial, public, familial), and how the new local identities of imported texts were negotiated. They ask which kinds of books were the most mobile, and they consider what happens to texts when they migrate, as well as what effects transnational dissemination had on individual readers, and on societies and cultures more broadly. Geographically, the case studies gathered here range right across Europe, from Dublin to St Petersburg, then onto North America, India and China. They extend widely across the many genres and formats of children's reading, from cheap print such as almanacs and ABCs to fairy tales and fables, children's novels, textbooks, and beautifully illustrated gift-books.

Fokussiert wird in ADIL die Trias aus erwachsener Interaktionsperson (eIP), Kind und unterschiedlich sprachlich strukturierten Büchern. Dabei sollen Gelingensbedingungen adaptiven dialogischen Lesens (DL) anhand von Videoanalysen identifiziert werden. Um das adaptive DL in die Praxis zu transferieren, werden Studierende geschult und bei der Umsetzung an unterschiedlichen Lernorten begleitet. Evaluiert wird die Maßnahme formativ (Feedback der Studierenden und eIP an den Lernorten) und summativ (Analyse der Förderkompetenzen der Studierenden sowie der grammatischen Kompetenzen der Kinder). Maßnahmen zur Implementierung (z. B. Online-Plattform mit Diagnostik-/ Fördermaterialien) werden entwickelt. (DIPF/Orig.). ADIL focuses on the triad of adult interaction person, child and differently linguistically structured children's books. The aim is to identify conditions for the success of adaptive dialogic reading on the basis of video analyses. In order to transfer adaptive dialogic reading into practice, students are trained and accompanied in the implementation at different learning locations. The intervention is evaluated formatively (feedback from students and adult interaction person at the learning locations) and summatively (analysis of the students' support skills and the children's grammatical skills). Tools for implementation (e.g., online platform with diagnostic/support materials) are being developed. (DIPF/Orig.).

Abstract This article examines perceptions of colonial modernity as experienced by middle-class Bengali children in Calcutta at the turn of the twentieth century. This was the time in which the foundations of modern Calcutta and modern Bengali childhood were laid, and in which urban cultures of education and entertainment gradually replaced precolonial patterns of childhood. This article examines these transformations and assesses their role in the formation of new social norms that were to define middle-class Bengali childhood until the end of the twentieth century.

In the 1920s, with the end of the revolution, the Soviet government began investing resources and energy into creating a new type of book for the first generation of young Soviet readers. In a sense, these early books for children were the ABCs of Soviet modernity; creatively illustrated and intricately designed, they were manuals and primers that helped the young reader enter the field of politics through literature. Children’s books provided the basic vocabulary and grammar for understanding new, post-revolutionary realities, but they also taught young readers how to perceive modern events and communist practices. Relying on a process of dual-media rendering, illustrated books presented propaganda as a simple, repeatable narrative or verse, while also casting it in easily recognizable graphic images. A vehicle of ideology, object of affection, and product of labour all in one, the illustrated book for the young Soviet reader emerged as an important cultural phenomenon. Communist in its content, it was often avant-gardist in its form. Spotlighting three thematic threads – communist goals, pedagogy, and propaganda – The Pedagogy of Images traces the formation of a mass-modern readership through the creation of the communist-inflected visual and narrative conventions that these early readers were meant to appropriate.

Ein erheblicher Prozentsatz der Kinder in niederländischen Kindergärten hat einen so erheblichen Rückstand in der Zweitsprachkompetenz, dass sie kaum von dem als Mittel gegen Vokabeldefizite gepriesenen Lesen von Kinderbüchern profitieren können. Das erste Forschungsziel dieser Studie war zu testen, ob junge Kinder mit eingeschränkter Zweitsprachkompetenz von einem wiederholten Lesen digitaler Geschichten mit integrierten Videosequenzen mehr profitieren als vom Lesen digitaler Geschichten mit statischen Abbildungen. Die Versuchsteilnehmer (n = 106) wurden im Zufallsverfahren der Kontrollbedingung oder einem von vier Experimentalbedingungen zugewiesen, die sich als gekreuztes Studiendesign mit zwei verschiedenen Stufen des wiederholten Lesens (eine oder vier Wiederholungen) und zwei verschiedenen Versionen derselben Geschichte (statische Abbildungen oder Videosequenzen) ergaben. Als zweites Ziel der Studie wurde die Hypothese getestet, ob Video Storybooks den Zweitspracherwerb dadurch fördern, dass die Kinder ihre Bereitschaft zum sinnentnehmenden Lesen länger aufrecht erhalten, wenn dem Text Videofunktionen hinzugefügt werden. Als Indikator für den Grad an geistiger Anstrengung wurde in einer Substichprobe von Kindern (n = 42), die dieselbe Geschichte viermal lasen, der Hautleitwert gemessen. The Ergebnisse stützen die Hypothese dass Video Storybooks einen geeigneten Rahmen für den Wortschatzerwerb von Kindergartenkindern mit geringer Zweitsprachkompetenz bieten. Zusätzlich zeigte sich, dass die geistige Anstrengung auf einem höheren Niveau blieb, wenn ein Video Storybook wiederholt gelesen wurde. Diese Stabilität ist einer der generativen Mechanismen durch den Video Storybooks den Wortschatzerwerb in der Zweitsprache stärker stimulieren als Geschichten mit statischen Abbildungen. (DIPF/Orig.). A substantial percentage of the kindergarten population in the Netherlands lags so far behind in L2 proficiency that they may hardly profit from picture storybook reading promoted as a remedy for vocabulary deficits. The first aim of this study was to test whether young children with limited proficiency in their second language benefit more from repeated readings of a digitized storybook that includes video instead of merely static illustrations. Subjects (N = 106) were randomly assigned to a control condition or one of four treatment conditions crossing two levels of repetition (one or four exposures) with two versions of the same story (merely static pictures vs., instead of pictures, video representations). A second aim was to test the hypothesis that video storybooks promote the acquisition of new language because children are more inclined to sustain their efforts to extract meaning from the text when video is added. As indicator of the amount of mental effort, skin conductance was monitored in a sub-group that encountered the same story four times (N = 42). The results support the hypothesis that video storybooks offer a suitable framework for vocabulary acquisition in kindergarten children with low L2 proficiency. Furthermore, mental effort remains at a higher level when a video storybook is repeated and this stability is one of the generating mechanisms through which video storybooks are more effective than static storybooks at stimulating L2 vocabulary. (DIPF/Orig.).

This paper explores accounts and understandings of dementia that are encountered infrequently. Children’s views of dementia are under-explored and yet children, too, must be being influenced by the growing public knowledge of dementia as a named disease, particularly of old age. The first section notes that many children will encounter dementia among family members, their grandparents and great-grandparents in particular. The second section considers fictionalized accounts of dementia. These are assuming greater exposure, not so much in the professional welfare domain, but as a plot or character device in contemporary fiction. This paper combines these two areas by discussing a number of publications written for young people where dementia is a central issue, motif or characteristic. These include dementia-related material targeted at a children’s readership. This is followed by development of themes arising from analysis of three novels written for young people, emanating from Canada, Australia and the UK. The paper ends with a series of discussion points for social-work practitioners, educationalists and voluntary-sector support or self-help groups working in dementia care and in older people’s services.