One of the strategies that I advocate when working on reading with non-speaking pupils is picture matching. The premise is simple. The child reads the given word (in their ‘thinking voice’ in their head) but are unable to vocalise it. We can offer them a selection of pictures, one of which matches the word. The child simply points to indicate their choice of picture.
Here's an example:
We can, of course, go in the opposite direction. Offer a picture and then a choice of words from which the child selects the correct one. Below I have expanded this to reading a simple phrase.
I usually find that beyond simple phrases the strategy’s usefulness is limited, simply because it is tricky to find pictures to match sentences.
AI may hold the answer and open the way to quickly generating bespoke pictures to match any sentence.
Take a look at this sentence, written specifically to contain lots of words with the sound /oa/ in. This is the sort of sentence a child might read when they are working on the sound /oa/ in phonics lessons.
The old man sat in the boat and floated slowly toward home.
I used Midjourney to create these potential picture options:
I was able to maintain consistency of style across all the pictures as you can see, but the type of image can be changed to best fit in with the pupils you are working with. Here’s a picture for the same sentence, but clearly different in style.
I think this is an exciting, versatile and very positive application of AI for non-speaking learners.
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