SpeakESL - YRA

The Young Reading Assistant’s

The Young Reading Assistant’s core concept revolves around a simple proposition: students learning English as a Foreign Language will more easily learn to read if someone listens to them read and provides guided oral feedback.

The Young Reading Assistant’s technology provides students and teachers with a powerful automated helper that allows students to practice oral reading independently with immediate feedback—practice that builds reading fluency and comprehension. Our software uses proprietary speech recognition technology specifically tailored for children to listen to new readers and record and track their individual progress.

Here’s how it works. Students read exciting content such as English stories and poems from the best publishers into a computer through a microphone included with the software.

As students read into the microphone, our speech recognition technology tracks their reading performance and offers help-by pronouncing the word or providing a definition when it's needed. The application includes a record and playback feature as well as progress reports for teachers and parents.


Student selects story to read.	Student reads aloud into microphone.	When a student gets stuck on a word, Young Reading Assistant supplies its correct pronunciation.	Student is prompted to repeat the word and encouraged to read on for comprehension	Software creates report for teachers

The Young Reading Assistant’s technology has an interactive English to Japanese dictionary to help students view new words and concepts contextually to really learn how language works. For teachers, Young Reading Assistant also records each student reading to the computer’s hard drive for later review, and tracks student progress to help teachers diagnose what obstacles a given student is facing, and then gives teachers tool to help adjust the software to that student’s needs.

Young Reading Assistant is the only reading software for English as a Foreign Language that builds reading fluency skills through oral reading practice with guidance and feedback. It has been recommended in the US by the National Reading Panel as a learning process that improves reading skills.