Co-designing AI-mediated Paired Reading for Children in Swedish Classrooms

Reading proficiency is foundational for children’s future opportunities, yet many struggle to develop adequate literacy skills due to limited instructional resources and increasingly diverse classrooms. While one-to-one tutoring is highly effective, it is difficult to scale. We present AI paired reading for Swedish, co-designed iteratively with teachers and children to complement classroom practice and promote reading engagement. The system combines automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, and large language models to enable children to read with a virtual peer. A mixed-methods classroom study with 43 second-grade pupils showed high engagement, sustained motivation and voluntary re-use. However, the study also revealed key design tensions around feedback clarity, difficulty adaptation, and the role of AI as a peer versus evaluator. We contribute empirically grounded design insights for AI-supported reading with children and discuss implications for integrating AI into classroom literacy practices.