Bridging The Gap Teaching and Assessing Spoken English

Bridging The Gap: Teaching and Assessing Spoken English Carnegie Speech

Carnegie Speech • Advanced products for testing & improving speaking skills for nonnative speakers • Software company with proprietary pinpointing technology licensed from Carnegie Mellon University and its Language Technologies Institute • Outtake of > 20 years of language research • Marquee customers w/proven results • Installed globally in US, MX, El Salvador, India, Poland, Romania, Costa Rica, Philippines, Korea, Singapore, and China

Carnegie Speech’s Products • Applications that are effective: – Self-paced – With a trainer/assessor – Windows LAN or desktop based, Web available 1 Q 2008 • Carnegie Speech Assessment provides costeffective, scalable solution for – Hiring Screens – Pre and Post-Training Assessments – QA Screens • Native Accent provides cost-effective, scalable solutions for comprehensibility – Pronunciation Training – Refresher Training

Carnegie Speech’s Solution Tutor Assessment Machine Learning Adapts to individuals’ abilities and learning styles Tailors assessment to customer’s task Pinpointing Identifies student’s exact errors ESL Increases effectiveness of remediation and assessment Speech Recognition Customized for increased accuracy

Carnegie Speech Assessment • Assessment – 30 sentences balanced for 250 subskills of English. – Tutorial explaining interface. – Applicant reads sentences. – Takes about 10 minutes. • Reporting – individual and summary reports

Aggregated Assessment Report Summary Assessment Report for All Phones Created on October 31, 2007 Date Articulation Score Assessmnt Results Annuradha March 22, 2007 27 / 38 Train Articulation - AA, EH, M, N, NG, S, T, UW, W, Y, Z Sunil March 19, 2007 34 / 38 Pass Articulation - AA, AY, F, W Anita March 22, 2007 32 / 38 Pass Articulation - AA, D, DH, P, T, Y Prasad March 22, 2007 26 / 38 Train Articulation - AA, AE, AY, DH, OY, P, S, UH, UW, W, Y, Z Name Comments

Assessment Effectiveness Analysis Carnegie Speech Assessment Calibration Statistics 100 50 Candidates Employees 0 % of Software Classifications Matching Organization’s In-Person Classifications • Carnegie Speech software and Company Linguist assessed interview candidates and employees • Interview assessments - 94% agreement • Employee assessments - 91% agreement

Native Accent Training • Assessment – Biased by native language – Initial assessment of student – Ongoing guidance to the curriculum manager • Intelligent English pronunciation tutor – Phonetics – Duration – Pitch • Multi-modal feedback – Aural – Written – Pictorial • Reporting – individual and class

Native Accent Features • Phonemic-level assessment with 3 -5 second feedback • Detailed, comprehensible instructions for remediation, not “try again” not a waveform • Customized curriculum for the individual for a 15 -40 hour course • Customized curriculum for native language of speaker. Supports 9 Indian languages. • Gender-based model speakers • Objective quantitative skill measurement • Self-paced • With a trainer/assessor

Pilot Results - India • 13 hours of training on phonemes and prosody • Decreases trainer time by 64% • Delivers training at 50% of the cost

Native Accent for Teaching Iraqi Arabic to US Personnel

Native Accent for Arabic (cont. )

Pronunciation – Phonetics • Text is colored based on pinpointing

Grammar • Multiple choice answers are crossed through when incorrect

Sentence Stress • Pitch scale describes how to match pitch

Sentence Pause Reduction • Take Food • Take Food • Word pairs appear one at a time, with the space between each decreasing each time