Literacy is crucial for functioning in modern society. It underpins everything from educational attainment and employment opportunities to health outcomes. We describe My Turn To Read, an app that uses interleaved reading to help developing and struggling readers improve reading skills while reading for meaning and pleasure. We hypothesize that the longer-term impact of the app will be to help users become better, more confident readers with an increased stamina for extended reading. We describe the technology and present preliminary evidence in support of this hypothesis.

This paper is a preliminary report on using text complexity measurement in the service of a new educational application. We describe a reading intervention where a child takes turns reading a book aloud with a virtual reading partner. Our ultimate goal is to provide meaningful feedback to the parent or the teacher by continuously tracking the child’s improvement in reading fluency. We show that this would not be a simple endeavor, due to an intricate relationship between text complexity from the point of view of comprehension and reading rate.