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Project LISTEN |
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Summary |
Summary Project LISTEN (Literacy Innovation that Speech Technology ENables) is an inter-disciplinary research project at Carnegie Mellon University to develop a novel tool to improve literacy -- an automated Reading Tutor that displays stories on a computer screen, and listens to children read aloud. To provide a pleasant, authentic experience in assisted reading, the Reading Tutor lets the child choose from a menu of high-interest stories from Weekly Reader and other sources -- including user-authored stories. The Reading Tutor adapts Carnegie Mellon’s Sphinx-II speech recognizer to analyze the student’s oral reading. The Reading Tutor intervenes when the reader makes mistakes, gets stuck, clicks for help, or is likely to encounter difficulty. The Reading Tutor responds with assistance modelled in part after expert reading teachers, but adapted to the capabilities and limitations of the technology. The current version runs under Windows(TM) 2000 or XP on an ordinary personal computer. Though not (yet) a commercial product, the Reading Tutor has been used daily by hundreds of children, as part of studies to test its effectiveness. Thousands of hours of usage logged at multiple levels of detail, including millions of words read aloud, provide unique opportunities for educational data mining. Project LISTEN has been supported by NSF under the IERI and ITR programs, and is currently supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Educational Sciences under Grants R305B070458, R305A080157, and R305A080628, and by the Heinz Endowments. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the U. S. Department of Education, the Institute of Educational Sciences, or the Heinz Endowments.
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