Readability index as a design criterion for elicited imitation tasks in automatic oral proficiency assessment

Abstract

The authors investigate the effectiveness of using an accepted readability index, the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) scale, to design prompts for an automatic oral proficiency assessment system. The prompts in question are uttered by the system, and must be repeated from memory by the test subjects, in the form of an elicited imitation exercise. The FRE scores for their prompts are shown to correlate well with the repeat accuracy ratings given to the same prompts by human judges. The prompts are also shown to perform well in the automatic assessment of oral proficiency by means of the elicited imitation tasks with more than one group of university students. The authors therefore conclude that a readability index, such as the FRE, can be used as a design criterion for prompts in an automated elicited imitation test.