Applying speech and language technology to foreign language education

In recent years modern techniques involving speech processing have been gaining increasing interest among researchers and companies involved in the integration of new technologies into second language (L2) tutoring systems. At the same time, pronunciation and prosody have finally gained due attention among L2 teachers and learners. The paper describes technical and linguistic specifications for the EURONOUNCE project whose aim is to create software which will integrate non-native speech analysis and recognition with a primary goal of detecting L2 learners´ pronunciation and prosodic errors and offering multimodal feedback. The software is aimed at specific language pairs, namely Polish, Russian, Czech and Slovak learners of German and vice versa. Beside information concerning the collection, structure and annotation of the multilingual speech corpora the article outlines the feedback system as well as the Pitch Line program which can be implemented in the prosody training module of the Euronounce tutoring system.