Abstract
The current study examined the effect of pointing to the words and using highlighted text by examining eye movements when children in preschool, Grade 1 and 2 were read storybooks of two levels of difficulty. For all children, pointing to and highlighting the text was observed to increase the amount of time and number of fixations on the printed text than when there was no intervention. Furthermore, with difficult text, an increased amount of time and number of fixations was observed when the text was pointed to than when it was highlighted. For preschoolers, even with the increased attention on the text from pointing to and highlighting the words, the fixations did not match the narration. First and second graders, with the difficult book, made more matching fixations both when the printed text was pointed to and highlighted than when no intervention was done. Additionally, more matching fixations were made when the printed text was highlighted than when pointed to. Future research is required to examine the effects of attention-orienting strategies on reading related outcomes.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a Grant from the Consortium National de Formation en Santé to Annie Roy-Charland as well as a Canada Foundation for Innovation infrastructure Grant and a NSERC Discovery Grant to Annie Roy-Charland. We thank Natasha Pitt for her assistance in running participants and data coding for the pre-schoolers and Cheryl Young for the first and second graders. We also thank Sylvain Boucher from Le Loup FM for his assistance in producing the audio tracks.
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Roy-Charland, A., Perron, M., Boulard, J. et al. “If I point, do they look?”: The impact of attention–orientation strategies on text exploration during shared book reading. Read Writ 28, 1285–1305 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9571-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9571-2