The Application of Digital Picture Books in Cultivating Preschool Children's Language Expression Ability: An Empirical Study

Abstract

With the rapid development of Information technologies and the wide spread of computing，digital educational resources have become fundamental components of the early childhood education ecosystem instead of novel additions. This research tries to find out how interactive digital picture books affect how little kids use words and talk by looking closely at three main parts: the names and words they get from these books, how sentences are made and joined together, and if stories make sense when read. Utilizing a rigorous quasi experimental pre-post design, the study was comprised of 120 children ages four to five, drawn from two similar demographic kindergartens. The participants were randomly assigned into experimental group where they had access to highly interactive digital picture books and the control group with traditional print picture books with similar storylines. The intervention lasted for 16 weeks: The study showed that while there were developmental improvements for both of the groups, the experimental group’s gains were statistically significant within the expressive vocabulary -specifically with verbs, adjectives- and MLU. And, in the qualitative analysis of the narrative retelling task in detail, it was also found that the children who were exposed to the digital format had a better understanding of more complex story structures as well as providing more description. And from the study results, it is seen that digital picture book with synchronized animation, congruent sound and interactive hotspot for teaching purposes as its multimedia component provides important cognitive scaffolding for language output. This gives evidence-based direction to teachers and guardians how to mix digital reading into early reading plans so as to strengthen verbal ability instead of just watching passively.