Skill-specific spoken dialogs in a Reading Tutor that listens

Abstract

Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor listens to children read aloud. A controlled study indicates that the Reading Tutor helps children's reading comprehension. However, the results for word attack (decoding) skills and word identification skills were not statistically better than in the control condition. Our thesis therefore proposes to develop skill-specific dialogs based on cognitive skill models and successful tutoring strategies. These dialogs will be dynamically assembled by the Reading Tutor and include text, speech, illustrations, and dialog parameters. We hypothesize that such dialogs will improve elementary students' reading abilities.