Speaker: Professor Chen Hua

Title: Automatic Evaluation of Chinese Students’ Oral English in the Context of Global English

Time: 15:00-17:00, Wednesday, 20 November 2019

Venue: Lecture Hall of first floor, Mingdao Building, Eastern District of Lanzhou University

Welcome the active participation of teachers and students!

Brief Introduction:

The traditional evaluation of oral foreign language usually takes the characteristics of native speakers’ spoken language as its reference standard. Due to the rapid development of computer technology and corpus construction, learner characteristics based on massive data algorithm have also been taken into account. In China, all the automatic evaluation systems, for instance, those developed by iFLY TEK and the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, are based on the characteristics of native speakers’ spoken English and extract results by reference of learners’ characteristics. However, in contemporary world where English has become a lingua franca, it is neither fair nor feasible to measure learners’ oral English output only by the spoken level of native English speakers. This lecture is intended to introduce the roles and tasks of linguists in the development of the latest automatic evaluation system for oral foreign languages, as well as the ultimate improvement of the system quality.

Speaker Profile:

Chen Hua is a professor of Nanjing University (NU) and a doctoral supervisor of Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. He also serves as the director of NU Foreign Language Department and of NU Joint Research Center of FiF, as well as member of NU Teaching Steering Committee, of the NU General Admission Group and of NU Development Committee. He used to be a part-time researcher of China Foreign Language Education Research Center. Additionally, he is the member of academic Committee of China Phonetic Association, chairman of Chinese Research Association of English Phonetic Teaching and an invited expert for the project of China English Rating Scale of Ministry of Education. He used to be a part-time researcher of China Foreign Language Education Research Center. Furthermore, he has visited the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at UCL, the Language Research Center at Radboud University, the Cognition and Information Science Research Center at Tilburg University, and the Brain and Behavioral Development Research Center at the University of Western Sydney. He specializes in oral English teaching and evaluation, experimental phonetics, applied linguistics, etc.

School of Foreign Languages and Literature

November 18, 2019