Enhancing Elementary Education: The Impact of Empathetic Questioning in Dialogic Reading on Comprehension and Engagement

ABSTRACT Focusing on English picture books, this study comparatively examined the effects of dialogic reading with empathetic questioning and standard dialogic reading on the reading outcomes of elementary school students. It evaluated eye movement metrics and measured reading comprehension among 54 fifth‐grade elementary school students in China. By analyzing the eye‐tracking results, the differences in total visit duration and total visit count between the two conversational reading modes were visualized. The results demonstrated that dialogic reading with empathetic questioning aided deeper information processing and improved story content comprehension compared with standard dialogic reading. Using an empathetic questioning approach engaged students' interest more rapidly than using standard questioning, benefiting the early stages of psychological processing. Specifically, the corresponding reading comprehension scores were higher. These findings suggest that teachers should use picture books with empathetic content and adopt teaching approaches that include empathetic elements in dialogic reading. This study's findings are significant in that they demonstrate how picture book tools and conversational reading modes with empathetic questioning can help students improve their English comprehension and performance.