Oral Practice

Your child talks with Jas, out loud, about a page of one of their own books — in the language they are learning. Every line Jas says is kept with a translation for you.

Oral Practice is a short spoken conversation. Your child picks a page from one of their own books, and Jas — the friendly helper inside Zen Reader — talks with them about it in the language they are learning, usually Chinese. Jas asks a question, your child answers out loud, and they go back and forth for a few turns.

It is practice between lessons, not a test. There are no marks and no scores — afterwards you get short feedback in words, never a number (see below). It is not the same as Listening, where the app reads a passage aloud and your child answers questions about it — in Oral Practice your child is the one talking.

Having a conversation

1. Open Oral Practice from the menu.
2. Choose a book and a page. A page is already chosen for you — the app skips past title and contents pages — but you can pick another.
3. Check How much to talk:

• Talk about it — two questions, and a word or two is a perfectly good answer. Jas shows an answer first so your child knows what kind of thing to say. Good for about Primary 1.
• Say a bit more — three questions, a sentence each. Good for about Primary 2.
• Describe the picture (看图说话) — Jas looks at the picture on the page and your child describes it first, in two or three sentences, then answers three questions. Good for about Primary 3–4. It needs a page with a picture; on a page of words alone it isn't offered.

It is chosen from the book's reading level, which is only a rough guide to how much a child is ready to say out loud. Change it whenever it doesn't feel right.

1. Tap Start talking with Jas. Jas speaks first.
2. When it is your child's turn, they tap Talk, say their answer, and tap I've finished talking. Jas replies, and so on. The microphone is never on while Jas is speaking.

When the questions are done, Jas says goodbye and the conversation ends. Finish ends it early at any time.

Help is always free

Under the Talk button there are three buttons your child can use as often as they like:

• Say it again — Jas repeats what she just said.
• Slower — the same again, more slowly.
• In English — shows Jas's last line in English, and reads it out.

None of these counts against anything — there is nothing to count against. They are noted in the record, so you can see where your child needed a hand.

What you can see afterwards

When a conversation ends, See the conversation opens it. Later, choose one under Past conversations and tap Open this conversation. Finished conversations also appear on Family activity. For every line:

• what Jas said, in the language she spoke, with a translation into your app language underneath — so you can see exactly what was said to your child even if you don't read Chinese;
• what your child said, as the app heard it, with a Play button for the recording.

Speech recognition of a young child is never perfect, so what the app heard may not be exactly what your child said. The recording is the real thing.

On some phones the app listens using the phone's own built-in speech recognition, which does not keep a recording. On those, the words are kept and the line says the recording was not.

If a line from Jas has no translation, it says so rather than guessing one.

Feedback — in words, never a number

After the conversation, an AI writes short feedback in the three areas Singapore schools use for oral work — speaking and fluency (语音与流利), content (内容) and vocabulary and grammar (词汇与语法). Each gets a band — Getting started, Getting there or Confident — and one sentence quoting what your child actually said. It is a rough guide for practice between lessons, never a percentage or a mark.

• Fluency is judged from what was written down, not from listening: nothing in Zen Reader hears pronunciation or tones, so the feedback never comments on them.
• If your child said too little, an area says Not enough to judge — that is an honest answer, not a problem.
• A parent can change any band. The report then shows your band and notes what the AI said, and your change stays if you ask for new feedback.
• What your child did lists plain facts: how many questions they answered, roughly how long they spoke, how many answers ran to a sentence or more, and — for Chinese books with an HSK level — which characters from that level they used.

Deleting or moving a conversation

A parent can Delete a conversation — every line, its translation, the feedback and your child's recordings go, and it cannot be undone. A child can only delete a conversation in which they didn't say anything. A parent can also move a conversation to another reader in the family with Move to another reader, if the wrong person was signed in.

A daily limit

To keep things fair while this is in preview, each child and each family has a daily number of conversation turns. If you reach it, the screen says so — try again tomorrow. If your family has used its AI allowance for the month, Jas will say when it starts again.

Your child's privacy

What your child says is turned into text — on the device where the device can do it, otherwise by the same speech-to-text service that checks their reading — and the text is sent to Jas, the same AI service as Ask Jas. A grown-up controls this under Settings › AI features. The recordings are kept with your family's other recordings and are deleted when your account is. They are not added to the recordings we use, with your separate permission, to check how well Zen Reader marks reading. The feedback is written by the same AI service from the text of the conversation, and is included when you export your data.