Reading is an essential skill for functioning in modern society, fundamental to achievement and success. Yet, an alarming proportion of students have significant difficulties with reading. Research indicates that computer assisted instruction (CAI) can provide an effective educational tool to help poor readers. This case study investigates the effectiveness of a CAI reading tutorial in helping ...

Automation of oral reading assessment and of feedback in a reading tutor is a very challenging task. This paper describes our research aiming at developing such automated systems. First topic is the recording and annotation of CHOREC, the Flemish database of children’s oral reading we develop in order to characterize oral reading processes statistically. Next, we propose a classification of bot...

This paper describes the development of a new Test of Child Speechreading (ToCS) that was specifically designed to be suitable for use with deaf children. Speechreading is a skill which is required for deaf children to access the language of the hearing community. ToCS is a child-friendly, computer-based, speechreading test that measures speechreading (silent lipreading) at three psycholinguist...

We investigate the effectiveness of using an accepted readability index, the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) scale, to design prompts for an automatic oral proficiency assessment system. The prompts in question are uttered by the system, and must be repeated from memory by the test subjects, in the form of an elicited imitation exercise. The FRE scores for our prompts are shown to correlate well with...

Reading fiction is a major component of intellectual life, yet it has proven difficult to study experimentally. One aspect of literature that has recently come to light is perspective embedding ("she thought I left" embedding her perspective on "I left"), which seems to be a defining feature of fiction. Previous work (Whalen et al., 2012) has shown that increasing levels of embedment affects th...

Two studies investigated whether there is a direct relation between children’s reading comprehension, their knowledge about the goals and processes of reading, and their skill in applying such knowledge. An interview revealed that less skilled comprehenders differed from same-age skilled comprehenders in their knowledge about reading and reading strategies, but they did not differ signiŽcantly ...