Can a Reading Tutor that Listens use Inter-word Latency to Assess a Student's Reading Ability?

This paper describes our use of inter-word latency, the delay before a student speaks a word in the course of reading a sentence, to assess oral reading automatically. The context of our study is a Reading Tutor that uses automated speech recognition to listen to children read aloud. Using the data from 58 students from grades 1 through 4, we used inter-word latency to predict scores on external, individually administered, paper-based tests. Correlation between predicted and actual test scores exceeded 0.7 for fluency, word attack, word identification, word comprehension, and passage comprehension. Compared with paper-based tests, this evaluation method is much cheaper, based on computer-guided oral reading recorded in the course of regular tutor use, and invisible to students. It has the potential to provide continuous assessment of student progress, both to report to teachers and to guide the Reading Tutor’s own tutoring.