Parling, a CALL system for children

The aim of this paper is to introduce Parling, a multimodal system developed for supporting learning of English as a foreign language. It is devoted to 8-11 year-old Italian children learning English at primary school. Parling features a set of instructional games that change their vocabulary content dynamically based on the user’s learning needs. Moreover, Parling proposes a key feature to involve more young learners: the Make-Your-Story tool, that enables the user to create herself a new story. The technological core of Parling is a speech recognizer that allows implementing automatic pronunciation assessment. The acoustic models are trained by exploiting speech data collected from native speakers of British English in the age range of the target system users. In this initial version of Parling a simple binary response, i.e. an accept/reject response, is generated for each input utterance. A more detailed feedback will be developed in future Parling versions.