Interactive Spoken Language Education  Telematics Application Programme - Language Engineering Project N° LE 8353

The increasing level of political and economic integration, the globalisation of business contacts and the increased mobility of employees creates an unprecedented need for multilingual communication and improved foreign language skills among European citizens. In this context the acquisition of good oral communication skills is central to the language learning process and plays a decisive role in any interpersonal communication process. Unfortunately, the acquisition of good oral communication capabilities can be a very complex and expensive task for foreign language learners. In addition, the social climate of a classroom can easily produce psychological barriers to the training of elementary speaking skills in a foreign language especially for those students who need it most. The main objective of ISLE was to provide technical solutions to support training of spoken language communication. This was achieved by developing computer based tools to support the training of speaking skills and by integrating such tools into existing multimedia-based language teaching software systems. These tools feature: the diagnosis of systematic deviations from the required pronunciation standards in order to provide the necessary feedback to the student to improve his/her pronunciation skills the recognition of non-native and possibly severely disrupted spoken utterances.

ISLE Demonstrator available! The demonstrator of the the ISLE project is available for download at www.ec-isle.org. This demo pronunciation training product enables you to glimpse at the power of the ISLE error detection and feedback system.

Participants	Country		Contact
University of Hamburg (Coordinator)	D		Prof. Wofgang Menzel wolfgang(at)nats13.informatik.uni-hamburg.de
ERNST KLETT VERLAG GmbH (EC)	D		Dr. Jürgen A.Schmidt j.a.schmidt(at)klett.de
Dida*El S.r.l.	I		Dr. Antonio S. Fabiano fabiano(at)didael.it
University of Milano	I		Dr. Roberto Bisiani Bisiani(at)dsi.unimi.it
University of Leeds	GB		Mr Eric Atwell eric(at)scs.leeds.ac.uk
Entropic Cambridge Research Lab. Ltd.	GB		Dr. Kamaran Kordi kk(at)entropic.co.uk