We ask you to participate in the DigiTala in action - automatic speaking assessment supporting integration project (DTA for short). In the project we will collect speech data from adult Finnish learners in integration training. As a learner of Finnish, you are asked to
Participation, including the speaking tasks, pre- and post-test surveys, is expected to take maximum 1 hour. You will be informed in detail about the setup before data collection.
The projects’ main goal is to develop a mobile application for automated assessment of language learners’ L2 (second language) speech in Finnish. The application will also give feedback to the learner. The project aims at further improving automatic speaking assessment (ASA) and making it suitable for language assessment in integration training. The mobile application makes it possible for language learners to practice their oral skills on their own, regardless of time and place.
The collected speech samples will be assessed by human raters (language teachers or experts in Finnish language). In addition, the recordings will be analysed by using different research methods such as acoustic analyses. Learners’ performances and human ratings are used for training and testing automatic assessment models. Moreover, surveys and interviews are used to collect students background information and views on for example automatic assessment and the speaking tasks. The data collected with surveys and interviews are used to improve the reliability and fairness of the test.
Participation in the study is voluntary. There will be no negative consequences if you choose not to participate or withdraw from it. Participation in the study does not affect other language assessments.
Your personal data is handled confidentially in the project and stored at the universities’ storage spaces that only project members and collaborators have access to. Direct identifiers such as names and contact information will be removed from the data, however, you may be identified by voice. Research data collected in the project will be deleted from the universities’ storage solutions after five years after the end of the project (2031) and contact information at the end of the project.
The material collected in this research is also useful in other research related to language learning. Therefore, we request permission to store your material (audio recording, survey and interview responses, background information and consent without direct identifiers) in the Language Bank of Finland (or similar trusted data archive). Participation in the study does not require that you give permission to store your material in the Language Bank. The material in the Language Bank will only be available for legitimate research purposes, accessible only for personal research upon application.
The DTA project is funded by the Research Council of Finland (2025-2026) and conducted in collaboration between the University of Helsinki, the University of Jyväskylä and Aalto University.
More detailed information regarding how your data is processed is provided in the project's privacy notice. For more information on the research, please contact Raili Hilden, +358504482514, raili.hilden@helsinki.fi. The leaders responsible for the research project are Professor Raili Hilden at the University of Helsinki (language education, collaboration with stakeholders), University Lecturer Mikko Kuronen from the University of Jyväskylä (phonetics, speech analysis and training of human raters) and Professor Mikko Kurimo from Aalto University (speech and language processing, automatic assessment).
Thank you for your participation!
06.05.2025