Utilizing ASR technology to enhance EFL learners intelligibility

The research investigates the effect of utilizing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology in enhancing students’ pronunciation of English at Kufa University – Faculty of Education. To accomplish the purpose of the study, a pre-test was given to determine a baseline for the students’ pronunciation. The participants of the study were 16 second grade students in their second semester of the academic year 2017-2018. The study subjects were divided into two groups, experimental and control. The experimental group was trained to pronounce selected probe words using ASR while the control group was coached to pronounce the same probe words by a teacher of phonetics. The data were analyzed by calculating the number of mistakes made by subjects on both the pre and post-tests. The results indicate that there are statistically considerable variances in the post-test between the control and the experimental groups, favoring the experimental group.