The European project iRead will create a software for the personalized learning of reading skills through games

Researchers of the University of Barcelona take part in the European project Infrastructure and integrated tools for personalized learning of reading skills (iRead) which will create of a set of technologies and digital apps to encourage, through games, the learning of reading skills and interest in books among children. Universities and companies of mobile and computer games will work together to design tools that detect individual difficulties of each kid when reading and will help them face these problems. The software will be set in different languages, with profiles in English (as mother tongue and second language), Spanish, German, Greek and Catalan.

“Each kid will have own reading texts, and we will detect, through games, if they have problems with verb endings, or other elements related to morphology, syntax, vocabulary, etc. Once this is found, other games are proposed in order to work on the difficult aspects for the kid”, says the lecturer of the Faculty of Philology of the UB Roger Gilabert, main researcher of the project at the University of Barcelona, which also counts with the participation of the lecturer of the same faculty, Sara Feijoo. “The idea is for the kids to have fun, but this fun has to be achieved working with language” highlights Gilabert.

iRead, which aims to teach and assess reading skills, is integrated by seventeen European universities and companies, the University of Barcelona being the only participant from Spain. The University of Barcelona will create the iRead profiles in Spanish, Catalan and English as a second language. After this first year dedicated to the project, between ten and fifteen Catalan schools will be selected and their teaching staff will be trained to use iRead in reading lessons. During the third year of this project, tablets will be given to students from these schools so they can start using the software. Finally, the last year of the project will be focused on analyzing the obtained results.

Each tablet will include a library with the books to be read, a reading app and a database for games. These interrelated elements will create a personalized experience for each student through the learning analytics, which focus on the study of data on learning processes. In order to design the system for iRead, researchers have some experience from the last European project iLearnRW, which was focused on English and Greek-speaking kids who suffer from dyslexia.

The project, iRead, is coordinated by the researcher Asimina Vasalou, from the University College London. At the University of Barcelona, the researchers Roger Gilabert and Sara Feijoo work on their tasks in the Research Group on Language Acquisition, led by professor Carme Muñoz.