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SPACE Reading Tutor:Design and FunctionalityLeen Cleuren

Jacques Duchateau

Pol Ghesquière

Hugo Van hamme

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Overview Presentation/Demo

• Overview Reading Tutor: 2 parts

• Overview of possible exercises with the Reading Tutor

• Demonstration of the Reading Tutor’s functionalities and exercises

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1. Overview Reading Tutor

Reading tutor consists of 2 parts:

– Part for the teacher/clinician

– Part for the student

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Part for the teacher/clinician

BEFORE REMEDY: preparation• Manage exercises

– Make new exercises

• Manage students– Make new students– Attach exercises to students

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Part for the teacher/clinician

AFTER REMEDY: assessment• Relisten to a particular student’s exercise sessions

• Automatically assess a particular student’s exercises by means of speech recognition

• Possibility to investigate the speech recognizer’s analyses in ‘Praat’

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Part for the teacher/clinician

• Results assessment:– Classification in 5 groups (cf. CITO):

• A: best 25% E: worst 10%

– Automatic detection of D- and E-children can be done with high accuracy (as good as a manual assessment)

– Only these worst performing children need to be assessed manually

time-saving!

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Part for the student

REMEDY: exercising• Make exercises that were assigned to the student

(Recordings are made during each exercise)

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2. Overview Exercises

There are 2 types of exercises

– Word reading exercises

– Story reading exercises

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Word reading exercisesWords are presented one by one on the computer screen

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Story reading exercisesStories are presented sentence by sentence/paragraph by paragraph on the computer screen

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Word reading exercises

• Exercise 1: child reads, reading tutor listens– The previous word stays on the screen until the next word is

presented

– The next word is presented • When it has been detected that the previous one was read (speech

recognition)• When the maximally allowed time to try to read the word has passed

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Word reading exercises

• Exercise 2: child reads flashed words, reading tutor listens– Each word is ‘flashed’ on the computer screen so that it is only

presented for a very short time (adjustable)

– The next word is presented • When it has been detected that the previous one was read (speech

recognition)• When the maximally allowed time to try to read the word has passed

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Word reading exercises

• Additional options– Spontaneous help by the reading tutor:

After x seconds without a try to read the word (speech recognition), the word is prompted by the reading tutor (speech synthesis)

– Ask for help by the student:After clicking a word, the word is prompted by the reading tutor (speech synthesis)choice between: whole word, phoneme-by-phoneme, syllable-by-syllable feedback

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Story reading exercises

• Exercise 1: child reads, reading tutor listens – The next sentence/paragraph is presented

• When it has been detected that the last word of the previous one was read by the child (speech recognition)

• When the maximally allowed time to try to read the sentence/paragraph has passed

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Story reading exercises

• Exercise 2: reading tutor reads, child reads– The reading tutor reads to the child (speech synthesis) and the

child tries to read along with it

– The next sentence/paragraph is presented• When it has been detected that the last word of the previous one was read by

the speech synthesizer (NO speech recognition)

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Story reading exercises

• Exercise 3: reading tutor reads and restarts, child reads– The reading tutor reads to the child (speech synthesis) and the child

tries to read along with it• When the child appears to be x number of words behind on the speech

synthesizer (speech recognition), the reading tutor goes back in the text to restart reading from there on

– The next sentence/paragraph is presented• When it has been detected that the last word of the previous one was read by the

child (speech recognition)

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Story reading exercises

• Exercise 4: reading tutor reads and accelerates/slows down, child reads– The reading tutor reads to the child (speech synthesis) and the

child tries to read along with it• When the child is not able to keep up with the pace of the speech synthesizer

(speech recognition), the reading tutor slows down for the next screen• When the child was able to keep up with the pace of the speech synthesizer

(speech recognition), the reading tutor accelerates for the next screen

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Story reading exercises

• Additional options– Cf. word reading exercises

• Spontaneous help by the reading tutor• Ask for help by the child by clicking the word

– ‘Normal’ reading pace reading tutor is adjustable

– Green box that indicates the word that should be read next

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Story reading exercises

• Additional options– The next word is presented when the previous one was read

(exercise for fast but inaccurate readers)

– After the reading of a story, the difficult words are selected an presented again to the child as an exercise

choice between: whole word, phoneme-by-phoneme, syllable-by-syllable feedback

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Story reading exercises

• Additional options– Pictures can be added

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Demonstrations …