About DigiTala in action

Why?

Language skills have increasingly become important for migration and integration policies (ALTE 2016), and in the integration of immigrants into a new country, they play a crucial role in education, employment and participation in society. Since the teaching provided by formal education is limited in time, the support of learners of a new language also requires tools to enable training that is independent of time and place. This is particularly challenging for developing speaking skills.

What?

The DigiTala in action (DTA) project aims at developing a mobile application for automatically assessing second language (L2) speaking in Finnish and providing feedback to the learner. The application will provide the learner with both a holistic CEFR level assessment as well as an analytical assessment of and feedback on central aspects of oral proficiency. When the tool has learned a sufficient qualitative model for assessment from humans, it will adapt for independent training for students from different language backgrounds regardless of time and place.

To whom?

The mobile application, which can be used independent of formal teaching and regardless of time and place, is suitable for all adult immigrant learners of Finnish. It can make learning faster and more efficient, which in turn potentially has positive societal effects through better integration of immigrants into Finnish society. In addition to immigrants, the app has uses in general basic education, upper secondary school and higher education. Independent training enhanced by the tool also helps learners prepare for exams with an oral part. Read more:

Who are we?

The research project is financed by the in 2025-2026 and combines the language pedagogy expertise of University of Helsinki (grant number 365232), the machine learning, speech technology, automatic L2 assessment and research result utilization expertise and experience of Aalto University (grant number 365233), and the phonetic and L2 assessment expertise of University of Jyväskylä (grant number 365234). The target language in the research project is Finnish as a second language.

Background

The (funded by the Research Council of Finland 2019–2023) studied automatic speaking assessment (ASA) in second language.The project developed a Moodle tool for automatic speaking assessment for high school students studying Finnish and Swedish. The DigiTala in action project (2025-2026), which will continue the previous DigiTala project, aims to develop the tool into a mobile application. The DTA project will utilize the results and experiences from the DigiTala project to further improve automatic speaking assessment in L2 Finnish and to make it suitable for a new purpose: oral skills assessment in integration training. At the same time, the usability of the tool and the reliability of the assessments will be improved, and speaking tasks and assessment criteria will be developed to suit the needs of those taking part in integration training.