Automatic Assessment of Language Proficiency through Shadowing

Shadowing is a practice that requires learners to shadow a presented native utterance as closely and quickly as possible. Learners' pronunciation in shadowing, especially in the case of beginners, often becomes inarticulate and corrupt. These features of shadowing make it very difficult to assess shadowing productions. In this paper, we investigate the automatic pronunciation scoring methods for shadowing. Three automatic scores have be proposed and compared with each other. Experiments show that good correlations are found between the automatic scores and human ratings or TOEIC overall proficiency scores.