Education: Want to read, children? Just listen to this computer: A program that talks back to pupils has dramatically improved literacy in a pilot scheme, writes Simon Denison

A COMPUTER program that talks is being hailed in the West Country as the possible answer to continuing anxiety over standards of literacy. It speaks back when text is typed into the computer, so that a misspelt word such as 'pnik' is pronounced 'pnik'. It is fun to use and allows children control over their learning. Best of all, it seems to work.

Dramatic and lasting improvements in the performances of 68 under-achieving children, aged seven to 14, have been recorded in schools in Somerset, where the system has been tested in the past year. After only six hours on the computer over four weeks, some children have advanced their reading and spelling ages by more than three years, and their concentration and short-term memory ages by nearly nine.

Every child who has used the program has made progress, at an average rate of 10 months in their reading and spelling ages, and 15 months for their short-term memory. The results have been so good, according to Annie Murdoch, a special needs teacher at Greenfylde First School in Ilminster, that she is 'disappointed' if a child advances by only six months as a result of the course. 'Remember that in normal circumstances, it would be a remarkable achievement for these sorts of under-achieving children to advance one month in a month, because they never have in their school careers before,' she said.

The benefits seem to endure. Tests taken a year after the work on the computers show that the improvements in performance are mostly maintained, and in some cases have advanced further, suggesting that the system can improve a child's learning ability generally.

It does so, according to Mrs Murdoch, because the computer corrects mistakes without knocking the child's confidence. 'There is no teacher telling the child that he or she is wrong, only a computer mispronouncing a word,' she says. The children learn to look more closely at what they have written, and get into the habit of correcting their mistakes. 'They begin to believe that they can cope with learning. They start to stand on their own two feet.'

ONE of the children who has been helped is nine-year-old Sean Wilkinson, who arrived at Greenfylde with a statement of special educational need and had been considered dyslexic by his previous school. Halfway through the course, his reading age has advanced by five months to 7.8, and his spelling age by seven months to 8.1.

Sean is asked to read short sentences containing words with the letter-combination '-aw' - such as 'lawn' and 'paw' - to remember them, and to type them into the computer from memory. Each time he presses the space-bar, the computer speaks the word aloud in a clipped, robotic voice.

At first, Sean substitutes the letters '-or' or '-awl' for '-aw'. He listens to the computer, correcting himself as he goes along. The teacher, sitting next to him, rarely speaks. By the fourth sentence, Sean spells all the words correctly first time.

Finally, he presses a key to tell the computer to speak all four sentences aloud without a break. With obvious enjoyment, he reads them out himself at the same time, trying to beat the computer to the end.

'I'm a lot better than I was before,' he says. 'Now I want one of these at home. It's much more fun than doing ordinary lessons.'

The basis of the system is the teaching of spelling patterns. '-Aw' is a relatively simple pattern. Slightly more advanced children tackle '-ai' or '-oa', which produce different pronunciations, as in said/rain, boat/ broad.

The computer needs to be supervised by a teacher, because it cannot correct all mistakes: for instance, 'accross' is pronounced 'across'. But some very common, subtle spelling mistakes are picked up, so that if a child writes 'thay', for example, the computer speaks the letters '-E-Y'.

A big attraction of the Somerset system is that it is cheap. It uses the Acorn Archimedes computer - already in a large proportion of British schools, including eight out of 10 primary schools - and an upgrade of Pendown software, the computer's most widely used word-processing package. The upgrade, Talking Pendown, will be launched nationally in early May, at a cost of about pounds 80, with teaching materials. The total cost of the Somerset scheme, including teacher time, has been pounds 2.37 for each month's advance in the 68 children's reading ages.

ACCORDING to Dr Chris Singleton, a lecturer in educational psychology at Hull University and a specialist in literacy, the Somerset system offers a much more promising solution to the nation's literacy problems than the much-vaunted but expensive Reading Recovery Scheme. The latter, a programme of one-to-one tuition for six-year-olds, has been tested in 21 local education authorities since last year at a cost to government and local authorities of pounds 17m.

'It is expensive because it is so labour-intensive, and I suspect that the nation can't afford it,' Dr Singleton says. 'The significance of the Somerset scheme is that it is cost-effective, easy to implement and seems to work just as well. Children enjoy working with computers and find them patient teachers.'

Martin Miles, an educational psychologist and one of the Somerset scheme's designers, says that it is still being developed, with many improvements on the way. Over the next year or two, he says, a version will be written for other commonly used computers in schools, such as the RM Nimbus; 'concept keyboards' will be developed for five- and six-year-olds as an introduction to using character keyboards; and the program's memory will be increased, allowing use of a digital, more human-sounding voice.

Talking Pendown can be obtained from Longman Logotron, 0223 425558.