Speak & Improve: L2 English Speaking Practice Tool

Abstract

A problem for building and studying approaches to automatically assess and give feedback to L2 English learners on their speaking ability is a lack of suitable data sets and platforms to run experiments on. This paper describes the Speak & Improve (S&I) speaking practice tool, which has been designed to meet the needs of researchers while also offering learners the opportunity to practise their English speaking and improve their confidence. S&I has tasks that allow the learner to demonstrate and improve their proficiency across the English speaking construct. Most of the tasks are free speaking, that is, the learner is not constrained in what they have to say. Over 400,000 learners worldwide have tried the alpha version of S&I. This paper presents the next version which provides more choice and flexibility to the users and more feedback on performance.