Corpus & AI-aided Spoken English Training Programme – Corpus-aided English Speaking Learning and Teaching System

The project, entitled “Revolutionizing language education: Integrating AI technology into corpus-aided English speaking training”, developed a corpus and AI-aided English speaking learning framework (Figure 1) to complement the lack of feedback when learning with corpus with responses from AI robots, and to allow users to judge AI’s feedback from corpus data. The learning framework was introduced to frontline teachers and students. A 5-week online training course was conducted during September to October in 2023, collaborating with the Department of Applied English of National Kaohsiung University of Hospitality and Tourism, Taiwan. 40 students attended the training course with positive feedback provided. In addition to the training course, invitations from other institutions including the School of Humanities and Social Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and School of Foreign Language, Northwest Minzu University (Link 1 & Link 2) were also received to deliver online workshops on this topic during December 2023. Over 60 researchers, teachers and students from English language related disciplines attended the workshops and provided encouraging feedback.

Training with Department of Applied English of National Kaohsiung University of Hospitality and Tourism, Taiwan

Building on the success of the initial initiative, the upgraded Corpus & AI-aided Spoken English Training Programme 2.0 continues to innovate in the field of English speaking. This new phase deepens the integration of AI with corpus-based learning, offering a more personalized, data-driven and interactive speaking training experience. Led by Dr Rebecca Chen, this project addresses the continued need for effective feedback in spoken English training. The project 2.0 enhances the original learning framework by integrating the 1.0 version of Corpus- and AI-aided with the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework. A flowchart was also developed to illustrate how corpus and AI can be used in an integrated manner to support English speaking practice (see Figure 2).

A range of activities has been carried out under this enhanced framework. In December 2024, a seven-session Corpus and AI-aided speaking learning course was conducted online through Canvas. Designed to harness the combined power of AI and spoken corpora, the course aimed to provide participants with personalized and effective English speaking training. Figure 3 presents the structure of the online course. Over sixty participants enrolled in the programme, and approximately one-third of them provided feedback through an evaluation survey and follow-up interviews. Participants expressed positive attitudes toward the integration of corpus and AI tools, noting that the approach created a more interactive and engaging environment for developing speaking skills.

On 15 January 2025, a workshop was held at Liaoning Normal University in Dalian, Liaoning Province, where a brief introduction to the English speech corpus was presented. More than sixty students from the School of Geographical Sciences attended the session. The students demonstrated strong interest in exploring the corpus and were particularly impressed by the detailed annotations available across four key aspects of speaking: fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation.

Another sharing session was conducted for EdU postgraduate students from the MATESOL and MTeaching programmes. These students, who are pre-service teachers preparing to enter the English teaching profession, were introduced to the use of corpus and AI technologies in designing English speaking teaching activities. During the session, students were divided into nine groups and tasked with developing their own corpus and AI-aided English speaking lesson plans. They later presented their lesson designs to their peers.

An international online workshop was held on Zoom on 12 March 2025. The session included an introduction to the spoken corpus, demonstrations of how AI and corpus tools can be applied in English oral instruction, an example of a corpus and AI-aided pronunciation lesson plan, and a set of teaching tasks intended to inspire both pre-service and in-service educators. Nearly three hundred participants from various countries and regions—including South Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and Vietnam—joined the workshop. After the event, over forty participants, including both pre-service and frontline teachers from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Australia, and Vietnam, expressed interest in the seven-session online course and contacted the team to request enrollment. Dr Chen and her research team will continue to explore the possibilities of integrating AI technologies into existing learning resources to facilitate teaching and learning of English speaking.