Young writers and digital scribes

Abstract

Speech recognition technology (SR) gives new viability to dictating, and in so doing may offer benefits to young, struggling writers. To become skillful writers, children must develop fluent text production (i.e., transcription). Composing via pen and paper requires the close coordination of handwriting and spelling, which can overwhelm the capacities of some young writers. Alternative writing tools can provide children with writing difficulties another means for attaining fluency. Relative to handwriting, SR enables less-fluent writers to produce longer texts with fewer surface errors. This chapter examines how SR can serve to accommodate children's writing difficulties.