Anna Elise Nascimento, 11, tests out the new LexiLearn literacy app created by Anna Queiroz, an associate professor of interactive media. Photo: Filipi Barbosa/University of Miami.

By Janette Neuwahl Tannen
5-26-2026
This story originally appeared in News@TheU

One of the first steps to successful reading instruction is ensuring that students can match the sounds found in words—called phonemes—to letters, or groups of letters. Also known as phonics, it is one of five critical skills that strong readers often master at the start of their reading journey, research indicates.

But in the last few decades, educators across the globe shifted away from directly teaching phonics to focus on reading for understanding. It is seen as one of the reasons that literacy scores have declined, and now many states, including Florida, are refocusing on phonics to help emerging readers grasp this fundamental skill.

Anna Queiroz, an associate professor of interactive media at the University of Miami School of Communication, noticed these deficits in reading instruction and came up with a new way for students to learn phonics. By pairing her expertise in virtual reality (VR) experiences with her background in education and cognitive psychology, Queiroz created an immersive phonics program that she hopes will foster strong student engagement.

“There are a lot of tablet-based literacy programs and reading and spelling solutions, but to the best of our knowledge, none integrates both evidence-based rules about how sounds are organized and modified in English and immersive virtual reality environments,” she said.

Called LexiLearn, the app helps beginning readers learn phonics through a game in which they are challenged to spell words in virtual reality. Players are flashed a word and then must combine letters or pairs of letters that make sounds (like “th” or “ph”) in words.

But the players aren’t typing the words. To earn points, players must throw apples (with letters or letter pairs on them) in order to spell the word out in front of a tree. Players use VR headsets to experience a vibrant forest scene and hand controllers for them to launch the apples. Working with a team of students at the Virtual Experiences Simulation Lab (VESL) at the School of Communication, Queiroz developed the app to help young students gain phonics skills and sound out words easily, so it becomes automatic. Ultimately, she hopes LexiLearn will help readers of all ages to master phonics, so they can move on to other reading skills.

“With this app, we are tapping into the very basics of reading, which is phonics,” she said. “Once you can decode words, then you can read short words and your brain creates a lexicon. Once the reader creates a lexicon of reading rules and exceptions, they memorize it and that only happens by practicing. The idea of this is for it to be a game, but while the students are having fun, they are practicing phonics.”

The app is also adaptable for each student. It draws upon artificial intelligence to customize the words based on each individual player’s strengths and weaknesses and adds an image to go with them. For example, if a student is struggling with words that contain a long “e” sound, like in the word “here,” it might give them similar words until the player masters spelling words with that letter sound.

And because LexiLearn is a game, students are rewarded for their progress. Each time they spell a word correctly, fireworks blast into the sky and points are awarded. Once they master a phonics level, players can move on to a more challenging one.

LexiLearn also allows teachers to track their students’ progress on phonics skills through a dashboard, and an AI chatbot can help them find more practice for students struggling with a specific phoneme.

“Hopefully, by having this experience that puts kids in their own world—free of classroom distractions or the embarrassment of reading aloud—it will help accelerate their reading skills,” said Bryson Rudolph, a senior research software engineer at VESL, who guided the student team working on the app.

For the past decade, Queiroz has been studying and researching how virtual and augmented reality programs can help people learn and absorb information. Her new Future Realities Research Lab aims to continue doing research about the best ways to utilize extended reality. So far, she has learned that some of the most effective and meaningful experiences in VR or AR often teach a skill or procedure that needs to be practiced for mastery. That is driving her to create apps that train humans in a variety of skills and to explore what components make these learning experiences more impactful.

This summer, she is planning to pilot LexiLearn in some school reading programs, and should they see success, Queiroz hopes to expand, offering it in more schools and education programs and adding other reading skills beyond phonics.

Students who helped develop LexiLearn included Kai Pettini, Neon Cao, Lucas Yeykelis, Christopher Eager, Marie Holm, Nasir Grant. Graduate students Xiaoqian Dong and postdoctoral associate Minci Zhang are exploring pilot study sites for LexiLearn.

“My goal is to get it in schools, to learn from it, develop new literacy games for this experience, and then build it at scale,” Queiroz said.