Nancy Dufault never realized she had a reading problem – at least not until a computer pointed out that she had one.

Now, she knows she reads too fast, her eyes skipping past words without her realizing it, making it difficult to absorb the information in the text.

“I always liked to read, and I thought I was good at it,” Dufault said. “But I never knew I was skipping words.”

That knowledge is critical as Dufault, a student at the Community College of Rhode Island, pursues an associate’s degree on her way to becoming a registered nurse.

And it’s an early payoff from the new computer-based speech recognition reading program that CCRI started using in earnest this fall to assist students who have difficulty reading.

The Soliloquy Reading Assistant, developed by Waltham, Mass.-based software company Soliloquy Learning Inc., has been used for several years by students in kindergarten through 12th grade. CCRI is one of the first colleges to try the technology.

“It’s early on, but we’re very enthusiastic about it,” said Michele Seylar, who teaches a basic reading course to 18 students at CCRI’s Liston Campus in Providence.

The equipment needed to use the Soliloquy Reading Assistant is simple enough: a desktop computer with a headset and microphone.

But the power of the system is in the software, which can evaluate reading skills as a user reads prepared text into a microphone. Soliloquy can track mistakes such as skipped words or mispronunciations. It also measures reading speed and can test users’ abilities to understand what they’re reading with comprehension questions.

If a reader stops or stumbles on a particular word, the computer can offer a pronunciation or a definition.

Users can also choose to listen to a digital recording of their reading, or have the computer play back its own version, so the student can model the rhythm and intonation.

“It coaxes and prods a student into creating better reading habits,” said Paula Domenico, an assistant professor of English at CCRI.

Many users have already experienced improvements, CCRI instructors said, because they’re getting one-on-one attention and they don’t feel the pressure of reading out loud in front of a class.

Instead, the students read only to the computer, which “reduces the anxiety – they’re only competing with themselves,” Domenico said.

And, Domenico added, oral reading is essential because studies have shown that it greatly improves fluency, the ability to read smoothly and with the proper intonation.

The demand for reading assistance is high.

On one recent afternoon, the reading lab at the Liston Campus was filled with the soft hum of more than a dozen students reading to themselves at their computer stations. Dufault, a certified nursing assistant, was reading a psychology text titled, “Why Do People Lie?” Now that she realizes she needs to improve her reading skills, Dufault said, she visits the lab whenever she has a few hours between classes.

CCRI officials said of the 4,500 incoming students who took placement tests in the spring and summer of 2006, 42 percent of them read at or below a 10th-grade level and without help would likely struggle to keep up in their studies. “It can be a painful process for them to extract meaning from dense academic text,” Domenico said.

While most of those struggling readers at CCRI are taught strategies on deciphering the important points in their assigned reading, the lowest-level readers – those who read below a sixth-grade level – are now introduced to the Soliloquy Reading Assistant.

CCRI officials said 40 to 60 students are taking the basic reading class and using the computer technology this semester. Many of them are not native English speakers, and the computer program is particularly effective in helping them, according to Pam Hallene, an assistant English professor and reading lab coordinator.

Already, CCRI wants to expand the program to assist all students who test below a 10th-grade level.

Soliloquy Reading Assistant went through a test run at CCRI in the fall of 2005, when the school participated in a study by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education which examined the success of various approaches to improving adult literacy.

During the study, a small number of students used the program on laptop computers. But this fall, the Liston Campus reading lab opened with 21 reading stations, equipment financed by a $101,000 grant from the Champlin Foundations.

“The adoption of our program at CCRI is very exciting,” said Louise Dube, president of Soliloquy Learning. “Although it has primarily been used in the K-12 sector, we hope that successful results at CCRI will pave the way for Soliloquy to be embraced on a wider scale by other higher education institutions.”

Nancy Default is already seeing the benefits.

She used to pass by words if she didn’t know what they meant. Now, she stops to learn their meaning, because her grades may suffer if she doesn’t. “So this is definitely helping me in my other classes,” she said. •