摘要:To keep up with information-driven society, one of the most important tasks is to
acquire foreign language skills, especially English, for international communication.
Of the four main skills for language acquisition (reading, writing, listening,
and speaking), we are focusing on speaking as it is the most difficult skill
for Japanese learners to acquire. CLE (Corpus of Learner English) research is
becoming increasingly popular in Japan, but most existing learner corpora focus
on learners’ written language. In order to construct a model of the developmental
stages of Japanese learners’ speaking ability, we decided to compile a largescale
speech corpus called “The SST Corpus”. Our corpus is entirely based upon
the audio-recordings of an English oral proficiency interview test called the
Standard Speaking Test (SST).