Summary:  Project LISTEN is an inter-disciplinary research project at Carnegie Mellon University to develop a novel cure for illiteracy -- 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 state-of-the art Sphinx-II speech recognizer to analyze the student's oral reading. The Reading Tutor intervenes when the reader asks for help, makes mistakes, gets stuck, 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.

Status:  The Reading Tutor is not (yet) a commercial product, but a research prototype we are testing and refining.  The current version runs under Windows(TM) 95 or NT 4.0 on a 200MHz Pentium(TM) with at least 64MB of memory.  In a 1996-97 pilot test at an inner-city elementary school, six third graders who started almost three years below grade level and used the Reading Tutor under individual supervision averaged two years' progress in under eight months.  In 1997-98, over 100 children in grades 1-5 used the Reading Tutor daily in 10 classroooms under regular classroom conditions.  In a four-month controlled study in spring 1998, children who used the Reading Tutor gained significantly more in reading comprehension than classmates who spent the same time in regular activities.

This material is based upon work supported by NSF under Grants IRI-9505156, CDA-9616546, and REC-9720348, 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 or the Heinz Endowments.

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