Listening practice for learners of English: towards an intelligent tutoring system

We develop a web-application for practice of listening skills by learners of English, which allows users to listen to pre-recorded sound-files and respond to multiple-choice questions. They receive feedback as to the accuracy of their responses, and they are navigated through the set of items in one of two ways according to the group they are randomly assigned to. Members of a control group are guided from one item to the next depending on success or failure with each new item, and the difficulty ratings of the remaining items. For the experiment group, item selection is made in an adaptive fashion: selecting items through automatic predictions based on individual performance and observations of other students’ interactions with the platform, as well as known item attributes obtained through tagging. Based on the cognitive literature, we also provide listeners with the option of controlling the speed of presentation of the listening items.