How can an automated tutor detect children’s off-task utterances? To answer this question, we trained SVM classifiers on a corpus of 495 children’s 36,492 computerassisted oral reading utterances. On a test set of 620 utterances by 10 held-out readers, the classifier correctly detected 88% of off-task utterances and misclassified 17% of on-task utterances as off-task. As a test of generality, w...