Dy-po T hon: A B angla Sentence-Learning System for Children with Dyslexia (2023)

Abstract: The number of assistive technologies available for dyslexia in Bangla is low and most of them do not use multisensory teaching methods. As a solution, a computer-based audio-visual system Dy-poThon is proposed to teach sentence reading in Bangla. It incorporates the multisensory teaching method through three activities, listening, reading, and writing, checks the reading and writing ability of the user and tracks the response time. A criteria-based evaluation was conducted with 28 special educators to evaluate Dy-poThon. Content, efficiency, ease of use and aesthetics are evaluated using a standardised questionnaire. The result suggests that Dy-poThon is useful for teaching Bangla sentence-reading.

## introduction bangla is the seventh most spoken language in the world with nearly 234 million native speakers and 39 million second-language speakers. it has many unique features including alphasyllabic script, vowel modifiers or diacritics @xcite which are not present in english. these get added to the consonant in the upper, lower, left or right position. bangla follows a different type of articulacy sequencing compared to english, in some cases, the vowel presents itself earlier in the writing form but while speaking, it comes later @xcite . these characteristics increase the difficulty for the readers @xcite . another unique characteristic of bangla is that, a lot of time the consonants change their forms completely when written as consonant clusters or 'yuktaksars' @xcite . dyslexia is a language-based learning disability @xcite where the person has trouble with reading, letter or word identification, phonological awareness, spelling skills etc. @xcite . being a language-based difficulty, dyslexia can be manifested in any language, hence it is important to conduct research on bangla dyslexia. looking into the sentences, the structure of sentences in bangla and english also different, english follows a subject-verb-object structure and bangla follows subject-object-verb structure @xcite . bangla has some more characteristics which is not present in english. bangla verbs have causative and honorifics @xcite . along with the discussed difficulties, bangla has an advantage over english. it has a highly transparent orthography which is easy for learners @xcite . ## literature review the most effective way to teach children with dyslexia is to teach through the multisensory teaching method(mtm) @xcite . it incorporates multiple senses through different activities which helps to train their weak working memory. moreover, computer-based audio-visual feedback increases the effectiveness of any lesson @xcite . however, the number of work incorporating these methods are countable. the number of research work available in bangla for dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia are also very less and most of them were conducted in bangladesh. dyslexia-focused sentence learning systems @xcite offers multisensory computer-assisted learning environment. apart from them, some speech-to-text(mubassıra and das, 2021) @xcite ) and text-to-speech @xcite converting systems are available in bangla which are considered to be helpful in dyslexia though they are not dyslexia focused. some android-based educational applications and games are available for alphabet and word reading and some of them offer a multisensory teaching environment. for sentence level, the only available technology is the aac avaz foot_0 bangla which was targeted to help children in communication. beside this, some bangla pictogram @xcite , word predictor @xcite , spelling corrector @xcite are available in bangla to help in dyslexia. but it is important to teach sentence-reading by grouping words together @xcite as it helps in developing reading comprehension @xcite which was not addressed by any research work. ## curriculum design dy-pothon aims to teach sentence-reading in a way which is helpful in dyslexia and before implementation the sentences were selected to use in the system. while selecting the sentences for the curriculum, four features were considered, i.e., spelling rule, length of word in sentence, length of sentence, and presence of concrete word in each sentence. the grouping of spelling rules is illustrated in the table shown in appendix a, for each spelling rule different lessons were created. conso-nant clusters obtained by adding two consonants, known as diphthongs, are grouped together; some of these clusters which are known as transparent conjuncts @xcite , change their form after the conversion, are grouped separately. triphthongs, created by adding three consonants together, are grouped separately. the most used bangla textbook "varnaparichay" was used for sentence selection and grouping of spelling rules. as it is important to show pictures to familiarize or remind the sound of letters, a bangla pictogram is developed to provide as hint, one frame of the pictogram is shown in figure 2 . figure 2 also illustrates how the sentences will be taught in form of word package. figure 1 shows all the developmental stages of the system. ## implementating different components and assemble them for developing reading skills, dy-pothon uses three approaches, mtm, reading and writing mistakes count, and the generation of performance reports. the purpose of the performance report is to provide documentation for each performance so that the special educators or the parents will be able to assess the performance of the students. ## evaluation of the system a usability evaluation is conducted with 28 special educators to evaluate the system in terms of four criteria, content, student involvement, ease of use and aesthetics. questionnaire(kara, 2007), specifically designed for teachers to evaluate an educational system, is used. the questionnaire has ten questions under each of the criteria and uses a five-pointer likert scale. all of the educators work with dyslexia and all of them teach language. the evaluation is conducted in a one-to-one setup where all of the educators are given a demonstration of the system and have the opportunity to use it. after that, the questionnaire is given to them where point 5 indicates strongly agree and point 1 indicates strongly disagree. ## results after collecting the data, the overall score given by each educator for all four criteria is calculated, as there are 40 questions with five points, the total score is 200 on which everyone marked the system. total scores obtained by each educator are given in ## future work experts evaluate the content and usability of a system better @xcite , however, the design and aesthetics should be evaluated by the user group. in future, the system will be evaluated by the children with dyslexia and their parents with pssuq @xcite . an experiment will also be conducted to evaluate the efficiency. ## conclusion this study aims to develop and evaluate a bangla sentence-reading system that is focused on the dyslexia-friendly teaching method. the available systems, except @xcite do not target sentence reading in bangla. all the dyslexia-focused systems help in word reading as they assume that sentence-reading is developed naturally. however, dy-pothon focuses solely on sentencereading ability. it will be useful for any age group with dyslexia. figure 7: report generated after completion of a lesson