Pronunciation Training

The Interactive Spoken Language Education (ISLE) project aims at introducing speech recognition technology into future Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) products for adult learners of English. One of the most prominent goals is to provide an appropriate level of specific feedback to the student in order to point out possible directions for the improvement of pronunciation. Existing courseware products on the market that use speech recognition capabilities are often developed without direct input from the end-user - for example, the feedback to the student is often restricted to a global quality measure without specific advice on how to improve pronunciation. ISLE aims to improve on this by localising errors to specific words and phones and providing clear feedback to the student (e.g., that a particular phone substitution has occurred, and what the student can do to correct this.)