Analyzing Effect of Repeated Reading on Oral Fluency and Narrative Production for Computer-Assisted Language Learning

TL;DR

This paper investigates how repeated reading enhances oral fluency and narrative skills in language learners, introduces a new dataset, and proposes a method for assessment using acoustic and linguistic features.

Contribution

It presents a novel dataset of learner responses and a method to evaluate oral fluency and narrative production through acoustic and linguistic analysis.

Findings

CALL system can assess improvements in fluency and narrative skills

Repeated reading benefits include faster reading and better word recognition

Dataset and method enable automated evaluation of learner progress

Abstract

Repeated reading (RR) helps learners, who have little to no experience with reading fluently to gain confidence, speed and process words automatically. The benefits of repeated readings include helping all learners with fact recall, aiding identification of learners' main ideas and vocabulary, increasing comprehension, leading to faster reading as well as increasing word recognition accuracy, and assisting struggling learners as they transition from word-by-word reading to more meaningful phrasing. Thus, RR ultimately helps in improvements of learners' oral fluency and narrative production. However, there are no open audio datasets available on oral responses of learners based on their RR practices. Therefore, in this paper, we present our dataset, discuss its properties, and propose a method to assess oral fluency and narrative production for learners of English using acoustic, prosodic, lexical and syntactical characteristics. The results show that a CALL system can be developed for assessing the improvements in learners' oral fluency and narrative production.