“It essentially combines the benefits of both speech recognition and word prediction to make what we call speech-enabled word prediction,” said MacGregor.
The software assists with punctuation as well, helping children learn where proper pauses are.
“Punctuation errors affect the rhythm of the sentence, and the rhythm of the sentence is maybe one of the more difficult things for teaching anyone either learning English or learning English as a second language. The rhythm of the English language often helps us understand the meaning, and that rhythm is better heard than seen,” MacGregor said. “Because they’re using their learning skills and [the program] isn’t applying some kind of auto grammar correct, they’re actually engaging what they know about the language with what’s represented on the page and how it all sounds.”
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