Paired Reading in Swedish with AI: Co-Designing for Enhanced Reading Engagement

Reading proficiency is a foundational skill that shapes children’s future opportunities, but recent global assessments reveal that many children do not properly develop this skill, also in countries that had previously been highly successful, such as Sweden. Teacher shortages and increasing numbers of pupils with dyslexia or migrant backgrounds limit schools’ capacity for effective reading instruction. Paired reading, where a teacher, parent or more advanced peer takes turns reading with and supports a developing reader is a powerful method to complement classroom teaching. Technical progress now allows to create paired reading with a virtual peer, employing automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech and large language models. Based on an iterative design process with teachers and children, we present 11 design requirements for AI paired reading for Swedish, with the aim of guiding future development of systems that foster engagement. A mixed-methods classroom study with 32 second-graders to empirically refine the requirements revealed high short-term cognitive and affective engagement, sustained motivation, and voluntary re-use, but also tensions around feedback clarity and text difficulty.