The Spanish Computer-Assisted Listening and Speaking Tutor

What is it about?

This article presents the Spanish version of the Computer-Assisted Listening and Speaking Tutor (CALST), an online platform that can be used to complement pronunciation training in the classroom. The Spanish CALST offers listening, speaking, and spelling exercises for Northern-Central Peninsular Spanish as an L2. Exercises are tailored by an automatic comparison with the learner’s native language based on a database of phonetically specified phoneme inventories for over 500 languages, with the result that learners with different L1s are exposed to different exercises adapted to their specific needs. In this article, we present a description of the exercises as well as the criteria used to develop Spanish content for CALST. We discuss the limitations of the platform, the logging of user results as a partial solution to these limitations, and the possible future use of the logged data to increase our understanding of L2 acquisition.

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