The Use of Speech Recognition Software as an English Language Oral Assessment Instrument

This paper explores the potential for the use of speech recognition technology to test the oral proficiency of learners of English as a second language. The study described here follows from an earlier study in which subjects read a text aloud into the speech recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking and extends that study to include the analysis and scoring of the output of the speech recognition software by means of a computer program. Results indicate that the computer program discriminated well between the native and non-native speakers and also correlated highly with the results of traditional analyses. The paper concludes with the note of circumspection by pointing out that the current implementation of speech recognition technology is still far from being readily usable primarily because the technology is speaker-dependent and has to be trained to recognize each person's voice.