Improving Chinese Reading Comprehensions of Dyslexic Children via VR Reading: A Step Towards Tackling Dyslexia with Top-Down Teaching

Dyslexia cause neurological limitations upon its patients such that they have poor phonological awareness and orthographical skills. This in turn limit the patients’ abilities to derive meaning from words which are keys to effective reading. To aid dyslexics in their comprehensions, a top-down approach to reading is proposed. In the meanwhile, a graphical model is also proposed as a tool to help researchers pinpoint neurological processes. It cleanly shows that the top-down approach could bypass dyslexic patients’ neurological limitations. It is also hypothesized that by aiding their understanding of articles and words, it is also possible for patients to improve their phonological awareness and orthographical skills. Our implementation to the research goals is VR reading, which uses multimedia feedback to give cues to dyslexic students on the meaning of words and articles. VR reading consists of aiding images, voice-overs, videos and a background theme dome that gives encapsulated cues on the meanings of the article and its words that are detached from the article itself. This is an important design decision as we want dyslexic students to rely more on multimedia feedback in deriving the meaning. We also show a preliminary evaluation which is a step towards testifying the aforementioned hypotheses with VR reading. It involves primary school children to read a Chinese article and be evaluated afterwards. The result seems to indicate that VR reading is useful in aiding students in their reading comprehension and additionally, has potential to improve their phonological awareness and orthographical skills.