The work presented in this paper explores the use of Indonesian transliteration to support English pronunciation practice. It is mainly aimed for Indonesian speakers who have no or minimum English language skills. The approach implemented combines a rule-based and a statistical method. The rules of English-Phone-to-Indonesian-Grapheme mapping are implemented with a Finite State Transducer (FST), followed by a statistical method which is a grapheme-based trigram language model. The Indonesian transliteration generated was used as a means to support the learners where their speech were then recorded. The speech recordings have been evaluated by 19 participants: 8 English native and 11 non-native speakers. The results show that the transliteration positively contributes to the improvement of their English pronunciation.

This paper describes a prototype of a computer-assisted pronunciation training system called MySpeech. The interface of the MySpeech system is web-based and it currently enables users to practice pronunciation by listening to speech spoken by native speakers and tuning their speech production to correct any mispronunciations detected by the system. This practice exercise is facilitated in different topics and difficulty levels. An experiment was conducted in this work that combines the MySpeech service with the WebWOZ Wizard-of-Oz platform (http://www.webwoz.com), in order to improve the human-computer interaction (HCI) of the service and the feedback that it provides to the user. The employed Wizard-of-Oz method enables a human (who acts as a wizard) to give feedback to the practising user, while the user is not aware that there is another person involved in the communication. This experiment permitted to quickly test an HCI model before its implementation on the MySpeech system. It also allowed to collect input data from the wizard that can be used to improve the proposed model. Another outcome of the experiment was the preliminary evaluation of the pronunciation learning service in terms of user satisfaction, which would be difficult to conduct before integrating the HCI part.