The ISLE Corpus: Italian and German Spoken Learners English

Background: ISLE project aims Project ISLE (Interactive Spoken Language Education) aimed to exploit available speech recognition technology to improve the performance of computerbased English language learning systems, specifically for adult German and Italian learners of English. The English language teaching industry is showing increasing interest in and awareness of the relevance and potential of speech and language technology (Atwell 1999). The project conducted a detailed survey and analysis of prospective user requirements (Atwell et al. 2000): we sought expert advice and opinions from a range of prospective end-users (learners of English as a second language), as well as “meta-level experts” or professionals and practitioners in English language teaching (ELT teachers and researchers) and industry experts in the ELT market (publishers of ELT resources, textbooks and multimedia). The ISLE project partners included representative users, English language learners at all six sites in the ISLE project consortium: Dida*el S.r.l. (Milan, Italy), Entropic Cambridge Research Laboratory Ltd. (Cambridge, UK), Ernst Klett Verlag (Stuttgart, Germany), University of Hamburg (Germany), University of Leeds (UK), University of Milan Bicocca (Italy). Leeds University is a centre for English language teaching and research; Leeds University, Hamburg University and Entropic Cambridge had ready access to overseas students from Germany and Italy; Klett is a major German publisher of ELT resources and textbooks; and Dida*el is a major Italian publisher of multimedia educational systems. We developed a demonstrator English pronunciation tutor system, including an error diagnosis module to pinpoint and flag mispronounced words in a learner’s spoken input (Herron et al. 1999).