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3.2 Class Room Environments
There are many problems for utilizing the ITC
technology in Japanese elementary schools
(Murayama, Aoki, Morioka, 2009). The problems
are listed in Table 2. For solving the problems, the
proposed text presentation system treats only the
electronic text. In Japan, a law forces to prepare the
electronic readable texts of text books (Law). And,
there are many documents accessible through the
Internet. There is no paper document for an input in
the proposed system.
Many pupils may remember the full text of the
many times used materials as text books. Those
remembered materials cannot be used for evaluating
the reading performance of a pupil. The reading of
the materials cannot help to enforce the reading
abilities of the pupil.
In normal class rooms, many pupils use the
Japanese text presentation system simultaneously. In
the environments, many pupils read the text aloud.
With a simple embedded microphone in PC, we have
difficulties to separate each pupil’s voice.
Figure 6: Japanese text presentation system with automatic
assessments.
3.3 System Design
The proposed Japanese text presentation system has
only 2 functions. As the first row of Table 3, we
restrict the functions of the proposed system. The
proposed system has some performance
measurements function about pupil. This is
discussed in previous section. The teachers around
the pupil with reading difficulties need the objective
measurements of the performance of the reading
ability of the pupil. For this purpose, the proposed
system provides the operation logging function. The
operation logs describe the reading speed at each
meaningful chunk of characters.
The proposed Japanese text presentation system
enables to use one-time materials for measuring the
performance of a pupil. The real-time presentation
generation enables any new plain text materials at
any time.
This real-time presentation generation enables to
adapt the presentation for each pupil with different
reading difficulties. DAISY has no function about
adaptation for each pupil.
For adapting the variety of pupils’ ages and
disability grade, the presentation system has the
function to replace the un-studied kanji characters
with hiragana characters. The phonic hiragana
character is first studied character. There is a little
difficulty about reading hiragana.
The operations to the presentation system have
the information about the user. The proposed system
logs every operation with the time. This log
represents the fluency of the reader.
The new system adds the video of the face
images and the record of the voice to the operational
record. With the video of the face image, new
proposed system measure the mouth movement.
With the recorded voice, the teacher may check the
pronunciations afterward.
The proposed system has the features listed in
Table 3. The first and the second rows are new added
features. They decrease the contributions of a teacher
about using the Japanese text presentation system.
For wide use of the Japanese text presentation
system, the system does not need large-scale
contributions of teachers. The network problem is
important in Japanese schools. There is a large
limitation about the internet access. As a result, some
cloud based implementation cannot work. The
proposed system must work without the internet
access.
4 AUTOMATIC ASSESSMENT
SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
We decrease the teacher contributions with the
automatic evaluation of the reading process using a
microphone and a camera. The new system records
the face images and the voice. The new Japanese text
presentation system includes the original Japanese
text presentation system. The new system includes
the function to measure the mouth movement, the
function to measure the voice strength and the
function to make reading difficulty assessment as in
figure 6.
4.1 Measurements about Voice
It is easy to measure the strength of the voice of a
Basic Japanese
text
presentation
system
Mouth
movement
measurement
system
Voice strength
measurement
system
Reading
difficulty
estimation
system
AutomaticObjectiveAssessmentsofJapaneseReadingDifficultywiththeOperationRecordsonJapaneseText
PresentationSystem-DesignandImplementation
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