Reading from digital screens has become increasingly common practice in educational and recreational reading. The response to this digital shift has been twofold. Some suspect it will harm children's ability to perform deep reading; others highlight its potential to support reading among different groups. Digital reading tools, such as fiction with multimedia hyperlinks, could engage particularly reluctant readers or children from low-literate families. This chapter presents the results of an experimental, mixed-method study that identifies hyperlink type and frequency desirability in literary texts. A comparative analysis of respondent perspectives revealed that teachers mark on average more explanatory and enriching hyperlinks than pupils. Pupil and teacher hyperlink type desirability are significantly influenced by respectively literary genre and reading motivation, and importance of pupil reading motivation and media use. Pupil and teacher explanatory hyperlink frequency are significantly influenced by respectively literary genre, and importance of pupil reading motivation.
Compared to the attention that children's literature scholars have paid to the construction of childhood in children's literature and the role of adults as authors, mediators and readers of children's books, few researchers have made a systematic study of adults as characters in children's books. This article analyses the construction of adulthood in a selection of texts by the Dutch author and Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner Guus Kuijer and connects them with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent concept of ‘childism’ – a form of prejudice targeted against children. Whereas Kuijer published a severe critique of adulthood in Het geminachte kind [The despised child] (1980), in his literary works he explores a variety of positions that adults can take towards children, with varying degrees of childist features. Such a systematic and comparative analysis of the way grown-ups are characterised in children's texts helps to shed light on a didactic potential that materialises in different adult subject positions. After all, not only literary and artistic aspects of children's literature may be aimed at the adult reader (as well as the child), but also the didactic aspect of children's books can cross over between different age groups.
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