Speech technologies for pronunciation feedback and evaluation

Educators and researchers in the acquisition of L2 phonology have called for empirical assessment of the progress students make after using new methods for learning (Chun, 1998, Morley, 1991). The present study investigated whether unlimited access to a speech-recognition-based language-learning program would improve the general standard of pronunciation of a group of middle-aged immigrant professionals studying English in Sweden. Eleven students were given a copy of the program Talk to Me from Auralog as a supplement to a 200-hour course in Technical English, and were encouraged to practise on their home computers. Their development in spoken English was compared with a control group of fifteen students who did not use the program. The program is evaluated in this paper according to Chapelle’s (2001) six criteria for CALL assessment. Since objective human ratings of pronunciation are costly and can be unreliable, our students were pre- and post-tested with the automatic PhonePass SET-10 test from Ordinate Corp. Results indicate that practice with the program was beneficial to those students who began the course with a strong foreign accent but was of limited value for students who began the course with better pronunciation. The paper begins with an overview of the state of the art of using speech recognition in L2 applications.