The Talking Books Project: Some Further Insights into the Use of Talking Books to Develop Reading Jane Medwell Abstract This article reports the continuation of some work already described in this journal in which the potential of electronic books for supporting read- ing was investigated. Jane Medwell's conclusions suggest that this particular medium has a great deal of potential use in developing young children's reading but also that the effects of different kinds of texts are different. As information and communica- tions technology embeds itself into teaching practice there is a great deal to learn about its most effective use and Jane Medwell's work offers a number of ways forward. The background to the project The teaching of reading in UK primary schools has, until recently, involved a high level of individual adult-child interaction with reading books. Such interaction involves sophisticated patterns of support in which children take a degree of responsibility which allows success and learning whilst adults offer carefully measured support to encourage confidence, learning and to prevent failure. This sort of interaction is time consuming and presents teachers with class management problems. It is not surprising, then, that electronic books which allow children independent access to books, with censure free support for reading, have become common in early years classes and are popular with children (Matthews, 1996). The fiction books available in disk format, and therefore access- ible to most early years classes, reflect the range of fiction available to young readers in primary classes. Some books are disk versions of classic children's picture books, some newly written but ungraded children's books and some are versions of popular reading scheme titles. The aim of The Talking Books Project was to explore whether talking books could help young children learn to read traditional, print texts, and if so, how they support children's reading. This project ad- dressed four questions: 1. Do electronic books help young children to learn to read? 2. How do children interact with electronic books? 3. How do electronic books support young children in their interactions with books? 4. How do teachers use talking books in ordinary classes? The Project The project involved two studies of Talking Book use in 10 mixed Reception/Y1 classes or vertically grouped infant classes including R/Y1 children. Children identified as having specific learning or reading difficulties in these classes were not in- cluded in the project. Groups of eight children from each class were selected in co-operation with the teachers. The project used methods of investigation that fitted into the children's usual classroom activity for read- ing. The teachers in whose classes the research was undertaken placed great emphasis on sharing books with the children, which involved reading the story to the child, the adult reading with some input from the child, the child reading with adult support, or a combination of these. Books were usually read and discussed more than once. The study design aimed to examine how well a child read a particular book before and after having different types of support. In Study 1 the types of support were: 1. traditional reading support from the teacher; 2. use of the computer talking book; 3. reading with both the teacher and computer; 4. or a control condition in which no support was offered between readings. In Study 2 the children either read the book with no support or used the computer. Using running record, researchers recorded the word accuracy for each reading, the errors made by children on each reading, asked the child to retell the story and administered a word recognition test for words in each book. The groups of children experienced all the conditions in turn to offset reading ability effects. They were observed using the talking READING April 1998 3 # UKRA 1998. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Rd, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.