James R. Nuttall, Ph.D.
Education Consultant
jnuttallphd@yahoo.com

Reading Difficulties.  Many students often have difficulties with reading.  On the 2003 National Assessment for Educational Progress test (NAEP), 37% of fourth graders and 26% of eight graders fell below "basic" for reading.  This indicates that clearly one third to one quarter of our students do not have adequate basic reading skills.  One of the major ways to increase reading skills is to practice reading. When students lack the basic skills for reading, they often avoid reading and practice, which continues and exacerbates their reading difficulties. 

Reading expert Dr. Barbara Swaby of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, teaches three fundamental steps in improving reading.  These are as follows: "reading to", "reading with", and "reading by."  The initial step in assisting the student with reading is the "reading to" step.  Students must have a great deal of literature read to them.  As Dr. Swaby says, "many people also have the mistaken notion that the "read to" process only occurs in the preschool years."  Dr. Swaby teaches that teachers should continue to read aloud to students throughout their entire K-12 experience.  The "reading with" step is a very active interaction of the reader, the book and the reader-listener.  During a read aloud period of "reading with" the student, the student looks at the book and follows the words being read.  This process is especially important for readers who are at or below basic level in reading skills.  Being "read with" provides students with experience in sustaining fluent reading periods, exposure to vocabulary and increased background knowledge.  Very often after students have experienced extensive periods of being "read to" and "read with" they are more willing to participate in their own "reading by" process when they are able to read independently.  But many parents and teachers indicate they simply do not have the time to "read to" and "read with" students. 

On Call 24 Hours a Day.  Fortunately, technology can help provide the student with the "reading to" and "reading with" experience.  Today's computers with the right software are able to read aloud to students and assist them with the reading process.  There are a variety of software packages which can read to students.  However, often this software is too expensive or is not available on a student's home computer.  TextAloud 2.0 is a great inexpensive ($29.95), yet powerful program, for providing the "reading to" and "reading with"experience. TextAloud 2.0 is from NextUp, Inc. www.nextup.com. TextAloud provides text-to-speech read aloud experience within any program on the computer.  One simply highlights and copies the text to clipboard.  This automatically then reads aloud the text.  The program also provides hot keys to assist with reading aloud.  You can assign any key combination to initiate reading aloud.  For example, you can assign the F1 key to initiate reading.  So, the student highlights a passage of text and pushes F1. The computer will read the highlighted passage to him or her,  which provides for a very quick and easy reading experience.

TextAloud Utilities.  TextAloud provides a unique proofreading tool.  The proofreading tool is very handy for assisting with the "read with" experience.  After a passage of text has been highlighted a proofreading window pops up.  The passage will appear in the pop-up window.  The user can set text font, size and color.  As TextAloud reads the passage, each word is highlighted for emphasis.  This is truly an enhanced "reading with" experience.  TextAloud also provides an Internet Explorer (IE) Plug-In tool.  This IE plug-in provide ready access to text on all web pages.  After TextAloud is installed on a computer the plug-in toolbar is added to the Internet Explorer toolbar.  The TextAloud IE plug-in adds buttons to the toolbar for playing stopped reading.  The student highlights text on a web page and then clicks the play button.  TextAloud then reads the text from the web page.  This is a great tool to help students with Internet research.  Additionally, many news organizations and newspapers provide daily news articles which can be easily read by the TextAloud IE plug-in.

Reading away from the computer.  One of the great features of TextAloud 2.0 is its ability to create audio books.  With self-made audio books, the student can read away from the computer.  Often students find reading at the computer restrictive, since computer time is limited or there is no computer at home.  TextAloud is able to take a text document and convert the text-to-speech into an MP3 file.  TextAloud can convert Microsoft Word, PDF, HTML or text (.txt) documents into an audio MP3 file.  MP3 files can be placed on a CD or an MP3 player.  Many students have CD or MP3 players at home.  This allows the teacher or teacher assistant to create audio books/chapters for students.  Students can listen to their assignments while at home or in study hall.  A student can load up the nightís homework on an MP3 player.  Now the student has someone to read to them anywhere at any time and on a device that easily fits within a pocket or purse.

The Technology of Voices. When purchasing this text-to-speech program, you must also purchase a computer voice.  Computer voices used to sound like Roby Robot, but they have greatly improved.  The way that they produce voices today is to actually take a recording of an individual reading a passage which is then divided into phonemes to create a phoneme library.  When you highlight text and send it to the text-to-speech engine, correct phonemes are chosen to create human speech.  The best text-to-speech engines are AT&T Natural Voices 16kHz ($25) and NeoSpeech 16kHz ($35).  Both of these text-to-speech engines are also available from NextUp (www.nextup.com). I have found that the NeoSpeech voices, Kate and Paul, work really well for nonfiction material.  On the other hand, I like the AT&T Natural Voices, Mike and Crystal, for fiction material.  AT&T Natural Voices also have voices in foreign languages such as French, Spanish or German which can be helpful for foreign language study.

The Computer My Reading Friend.  Once your students have become acquainted and committed to using the read aloud experience you will want to provide them with material on the computer to read.  How can you get such material?  One way to acquire text material is by scanning books or chapters onto the computer.  You may have your own favorite program for doing this.  But let me recommend FineReader Pro v7 (www.abbyy.com). FineReader Pro is considered the most accurate and also easy program for scanning books and materials. You can purchase the upgrade version for $150. Anyone with a scanner, which generally comes with a simple OCR package, can upgrade to FineReader Pro. It takes a couple of hours to scan a short book using FineReader Pro. An organization called BookShare (www.bookshare.org) is compiling a library of books which can be downloaded and read by TextAloud. There is a membership fee for BookShare. Classic books from authors such as Charles Dickens can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/).

Recorded Books.  An alternative to using the computer is to utilize recorded books to increase the "reading to" and "reading with" experience.  You can get books and recorded textbooks from Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (www.rfbd.org). One can also purchase common works of literature in audio format from local bookstores or Amazon.com.  Less often there are audio books available for purchase and download at Audible.com.

In summary, there are a variety of methods for increasing studentsí reading experience.  Again most importantly students having difficulty with reading need to experience extensive time periods of been "read to" and "read with." Todayís modern computers and a program such as TextAloud 2.0 can provide hours of read aloud time for your students.  I highly recommend the purchase of this program along with the accompanying AT&T Natural Voices, Mike and Crystal, and NeoSpeech voices, Kate and Paul.  I also highly recommend the production of audio books that can be played on CDs and MP3 players.  If you have any questions or concerns about the ideas within this article you can contact the author at jnuttallphd@yahoo.com.