SPACE Reading Tutor:
Design and Functionality
Leen 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 exercises
Words are presented one by one on the computer screen
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Story reading exercises
Stories 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-bysyllable 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-bysyllable feedback
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Story reading exercises
• Additional options
– Pictures can be added
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Demonstrations …
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