Analyzing students pauses during reading and explaining a story

In this paper we present a semi-automated analysis of student reading performance from the perspective of her text reading level and text understanding. Silences (pauses) between uttered words or read sentences as well as silences between verbalizations given by students are the key points in the analysis of their learning activities. Pause is an essential element in the analysis of a text, which also gives good control over interactions during the processes of text reading and explanation of understanding. This study presents the results specific to pauses in the reading and verbalization using Praat, a tool to analyze spoken productions. Correlations between students´ fluency, story understanding, and mean pause duration of reading and explanation phases show consistent results across texts for reading. Results about pauses during explaining yielded low correlations, showing that other variables may influence the pausing behaviors during explaining.