Computer readers - experience?

[TeenTimesTwo]

It has been suggested that DD2, y9, may benefit from a computer reader for exams, especially I think English Language where there is a whole chunk of new text to read and take in.

Any experience?

Hopeful bump. Maybe @AlexanderHamilton has some experience?

She will need permission for a reader in exams - has she been assessed? Computer readers are a good choice as she will be able to use it at home to help her when revising etc.

shumm Yes she has been assessed, it is the SENCO that has suggested it may help, she is going to give it a go in her next assessment.

I was wondering whether anyone had any experience, hints/tips, negative points etc.

I do have 2 specific questions:

• are they any good at reading poetry/Shakespeare?
• what do they do with spelling mistakes - read the word as written even if it isn't a word, or say it phonetically, or what?

Teen, I don't know as much about this as I should, but as English Language GCSE is, in large part, a test of reading, the point of a computer reader was to remove any unfair advantage that a human reader may give to a candidate who has one. A human would naturally add intonation, pauses etc, and therefore the idea of the computer reader is to remove these beneficial additions as the text is read. Thus, 'are they any good at reading Shakespeare?' shouldn't really arise as a question, as 'being good' would advantage the candidate.

Not sure what you mean about spelling mistakes, because surely a computer reader would just read the exam paper, where there shouldn't be any mistakes.

Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong!

Mrs Thank you.

I think what I mean by 'any good at Shakespeare & poems' I mean will they break at the end of lines or will it just sound like prose? So I don't really mean 'good' I mean 'sensible'.

DD said the reader could also read her own answers back to her if she typed them (currently hand writes). So if the reader read back exactly as typed/spelled it would help her spot errors, I think. But DD's typing is even worse than her handwriting at the moment, so we are debating the cost/benefit of pushing typing...

It depends on the reader tbh. There are many that can be downloaded for free. Some systems have them built in.