2019 Volume 18 Issue 1 Pages 1-6
This study proposes an index for automatically measuring the ease of listening materials to be understood (hereafter, listenability) based on the normalized edit distance between reference sentences and learners’ transcription sentences (hereafter, NED). Listenability should be examined in order to maintain the motivation of learners or increase the learning effect. However, unlike the measurement of the ease of reading materials to be understood in terms of readability, little attention has been paid to listenability, and when it has been studied, it was determined by learners’ subjective judgment, which is affected by learners’ bias. This study found that NED was more reliable and valid than subjective judgments in an experiment done with 50 learners of English as a foreign language. Furthermore, the accuracy of the listenability measurement was acceptable, because the listenability measured with the multiple regression analysis had a strong correlation (r = 0.77) with the observed listenability in a leave-one-out cross validation test.
