During the last decades, children’s interest in books and literature has dramatically declined. In the entire Western world, children and youngsters read less and less, not only at home, but also in school. This does not only affect young people’s reading proficiency, but also their language development and language comprehension, their ability to learn and reflect, as well as their imagination and understanding of others.

Obviously, there is a pressing need for innovative and robust reading-promotion initiatives, especially aimed at younger children. For this group, reading aloud has been proven to be an enjoyable but also effective method, not least by creating opportunities for children to sustain their attention – both towards the person who’s reading and towards the content of a story – over an extended period. Reading aloud has also been shown to foster cognitive development, strengthen relationships, and increase well-being at school – all important factors when later starting to learn to read.

Thus, creating settings where reading aloud sessions can be organized in a way that increases children’s attention and interest is of great importance. In this study, we explore a unique initiative in this field: a cultural center called Funny's Adventure, where reading aloud takes place in a rich and playful storybook environment. More specifically, the study examines the significance of the environment in relation to oral reading, investigating the children's levels of distraction and/or attentive engagement during reading sessions as well as their recall of the read story – either at the center, or at their regular preschool. 21 five-year-olds from three different preschools in southern Sweden participated in the study. All participants took part in two reading sessions – one in each environment – in a 2x2-experimental setup. The stories were chosen to match the storybook settings at the center, one being slightly more advanced than the other. Data was collected by observing and classifying the children’s behaviors (movements, expressions, gaze directions etc.) as either distracted or engaged, and by performing interviews with recall questions.

The results show that the children were significantly less distracted at Funny's Adventure than at their preschool. Still, the environment did not have any significant effect on the level of attentive engagement. Instead, one of the stories – the simpler one – seemed to grasp the children’s engagement better than the other. A multiple regression analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between Engagement_Level, Distraction_Level, Story and Recall. The optimal significant model had a moderate fit using all predictors. Specifically, the interaction effect between Story and Engagement_Level was significant, revealing that engagement had a stronger effect on recall for the more advanced story.

To conclude, a rich and playful environment illustrating a story may very well be an appropriate environment for reading aloud. Most importantly, this type of setting may decrease children’s tendency to be distracted – which in turn can affect the children’s remembrance of the story itself. However, if the fairytale is more advanced, the level of engagement will have a strong impact on the children’s memorizations. The right choice of story – together with the reader’s ability to keep the children’s attention – is therefore highly relevant, wherever the reading session is taking place.

Keywords: Reading aloud, memorization, attention, engagement.