An Exploration of Read-Aloud Videos on YouTube Made for Children
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Dr. Amanda Shimizu is an assistant professor of literacy education at Eastern Kentucky University who studies how young children engage, learn, and create with digital technology. amanda.shimizu@eku.edu
Dr. Margaret Quinn is an associate professor in the department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on young children’s development of 21st-century skills and early academic competencies. mquinn@tamu.edu
A young child on their tablet device taps on a read-aloud video on YouTube.
Right away a friendly face smiles and says, “Hi Friends! It’s me, Ms. Kelly. Today we are going to be reading a story about a boy going to school for the first time. What do you think might happen? Let’s read to find out!”
Then through the speakers comes music and sound effects, and the screen lights up with animations and bright colors before the read-aloud begins.
Seems like a beneficial learning opportunity, right? Well, we were curious about this, so we decided to analyze read-alouds made for children and posted to YouTube.
Read-alouds are a foundational practice of literacy instruction. Many of us can recall sitting in a classroom, listening to a teacher read a book from a rocking chair. Beyond building a love of books and reading, read-alouds support literacy development by introducing new vocabulary, modeling story structure, and strengthening listening comprehension, which is foundational to reading comprehension. Read-alouds provide a unique opportunity to experience a book that may be above the reader’s current independent reading ability. That means children can access stories that they would not be able to read on their own.
At the same time, digital technology plays an increasingly central role in the lives of young children. Today, nearly half of children ages 2-4 have their own tablet, and on average they spend nearly 40 minutes a day watching online videos on platforms like YouTube. Recently, the CEO of YouTube, Neal Mohan described YouTube as a visual library with lots of “books.” In this case, the “books” are videos.
This raises the question, what are the qualities of the “books”, or read-aloud videos, that are designed for children? More specifically, what are the affordances and the limitations of read-alouds of traditional books that are posted in the YouTube library? Are these digital read-aloud “books” something that we should be encouraging our young children to engage with during their screen time?
To explore this, we watched and studied video read-alouds on YouTube that children are actually seeing. We analyzed the 50 most-viewed videos that populated when we searched for pre-k read-alouds. At the time of our analyses, these videos ranged in view count from 324,000 views to 4.6 million views, good evidence that they are being watched by children. What we found in our analyses was that these 50 video showed had a limited range of genre and representation and a wide range of production quality and engagement.
Genre and Representation
We found that much like children’s literature overall, the genres represented in read-aloud videos skewed heavily toward the narrative genre. Of the 50 video read-alouds we watched, there were only three that were not categorized as fiction. Most books were either fantasy or contemporary realistic fiction. Meaning, although YouTube is a great resource to access free books, if you have an internet connection and don’t mind advertisements, read-alouds on YouTube do little to expand children’s exposure to a wide range of genres.
A similar pattern emerged with representation. Only two books explicitly focused on multicultural themes. Further, animal characters were the most prominent, being featured in 29 books across the sample of 50. In other words, diverse representation was scarce across the sample.
Video Features and Interaction
We also analyzed the read-alouds in terms of video features and the instructional interactions provided by the creator, who in these videos we felt was taking on the role of a teacher. Some videos were beautifully produced with animations and sound effects that matched the events in the book, but felt strangely empty from an instructional standpoint. Sometimes you didn’t see the person reading aloud at all, giving a more limited connection between the listener and the video creator. And in other cases, perhaps more strangely, you only saw disembodied hands turning pages, but you never saw the face connected to those hands.
Others were the opposite in terms of production. These videos were less polished, often created by individuals rather than major companies, but they could engage in actual teaching. For example, one creator used low-tech tools like puppets, but meaningfully incorporated thinking aloud, asking questions, explaining vocabulary words, and inviting children to think about the book.
These videos with higher instructional quality were somewhat limited, however, and most creators did nothing at all. They just read the book, start to finish. No pause. No interaction. No invitation to engage.
What did we learn?
It seems that while similar genres are represented in video read-alouds, they are not all doing the same kind of work. As we watched all these videos on repeat, a pattern emerged. There seems to be four general kinds of read-alouds:
Videos that look great, but may do little to no teaching, like this one featuring Bluey.
Videos that teach, but without all the bells and whistles in terms of video features, such as this one about slime.
Videos that do not effectively use digital features or do any meaningful teaching, like this one that includes a song about peas that is unforgettable.
And the unicorn of videos, that do it all. In our sample, there was only one that covered all the bases. You can check that video out here!
Why does this matter?
While we were not always impressed with the quality of the read-aloud videos we found, YouTube is here to stay. The videos analyzed here, and millions of others like them, are shaping how children experience stories, language, and reading itself. Because of this, we (the adults) need to learn how to navigate video read-alouds ourselves, so we can support children to navigate them in a meaningful way. In our full article, which you can find here, we provide a framework for evaluating YouTube read-alouds, as well as suggestions for YouTube creators, educators, and caregivers.
Whether at home or in school, children are regularly engaged with YouTube videos. The question is not whether children are learning from YouTube, but what they are learning and how they are learning it.