VB.net de-serialize XML and specify UTF-16 file encoding

I am doing the following to read an XML file and deserialize it:

 Dim serializer As XmlSerializer = New XmlSerializer(GetType(AppStatus))
    Dim appStatus As AppStatus = CType(serializer.Deserialize(File.OpenRead("c:\testing\statusData.xml")), AppStatus)

This is the XML file I am reading:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<AppStatus xmlns:xsi="http://ift.tt/ra1lAU" xmlns:xsd="http://ift.tt/tphNwY">
  <CurrentFileProgressBarPercent>0</CurrentFileProgressBarPercent>
  <CurrentFileKBUploaded>0</CurrentFileKBUploaded>
  <CurrentFileKBTotal>0</CurrentFileKBTotal>
  <OverallProgressBarPercent>0</OverallProgressBarPercent>
  <OverallFileNumber>0</OverallFileNumber>
  <OverallTotalFiles>0</OverallTotalFiles>
  <statusMessage />
  <logMessages />
</AppStatus>

This is the exception:

"There is no Unicode byte order mark. Cannot switch to Unicode

If I change the XML file to not have the encoding specified, it works fine. Is there an easy way to just specify that the file I'm reading will be UTF-16 so this won't be a problem?

I'm not very familiar with VB.net, just in case that wasn't obvious already :)

Thanks for any ideas!