A Reading Tutor that Listens


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Submitted by Ankit Ranka on Mon, 10/12/2009 - 2:30pm.

Recently, I came across project LISTEN (Literacy Innovation that Speech Technology ENables) as part of my research for "Topics in speech processing" class. As stated on the project page - "Its an automated Reading Tutor that displays stories on a computer screen, and listens to children read aloud. The Reading Tutor intervenes when the reader makes mistakes, gets stuck, clicks for help, or is likely to encounter difficulty." This system has already been used by hundreds of children which generated a lot of data for "educational data mining".

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Hui Soo Chae Says:
Fri, 10/16/2009 - 2:29am

Ankit, forget LISTEN. Let's build Reading Glasses to help kids with reading difficulties. We've got calculators. Why not glasses that read out loud for you? This is a project idea Professor Natriello proposed about 4 years back. Do you think we can build a prototype? Or maybe one already exists that you know of.

Ankit Ranka Says:
Wed, 10/21/2009 - 3:57pm

hui soo,
sorry i somehow missed your comment.
As far as I know LISTEN is the closest application which tries to help students with there pronunciation and tries to "predict" where they require help. We can surely build a prototype which will provide teachers with the feedback about the mistakes students did while reading and also help students with the pronunciation by "learning" there reading patterns.

Ting Yuan Says:
Mon, 10/12/2009 - 3:05pm

Thanks for sharing, Ankit. The Reading Tutor might serve as a nice database for recognizing the phonemes that children make mistakes for, which can help teachers/linguists see their problems.

The project can be further improved. As shown by videos on the website, the ebooks are all text-only. I guess younger children would not be motivated enough to sit before the computer screen in that way. Since there are thousands of animated/illustrated ebooks online, can the software be applied/installed to those ebooks in the future?

Ankit Ranka Says:
Wed, 10/21/2009 - 4:07pm

Ting,
You are right on point. A tool like this will surely help both students and teachers. And I agree that animated ebooks are far more better than text only ebooks. I will do some more research in this respect to see if we can build a prototype application which provides personalized help to students and feedback to teachers.