REAP: Reader-Specific Lexical Practice for Improved Reading Comprehension

Language Technologies for Education

The core ideas of the project are 1) a search engine that finds text passages satisfying very specific lexical constraints, 2) selecting materials from an open-corpus (the web), thus satisfying a wide range of student interests and classroom needs, and 3) the ability to model an individual's degree of acquisition and fluency for each word in a constantly expanding lexicon so as to provide student-specific practice and remediation. This combination enables research on a wide range of reading comprehension topics that were formerly difficult to investigate.