Using State-of-the-Art Speech Models to Evaluate Oral Reading Fluency in Ghana

This paper reports on a set of three recent experiments utilizing large-scale speech models to evaluate the oral reading fluency (ORF) of students in Ghana. While ORF is a well-established measure of foundational literacy, assessing it typically requires one-on-one sessions between a student and a trained evaluator, a process that is time-consuming and costly. Automating the evaluation of ORF could support better literacy instruction, particularly in education contexts where formative assessment is uncommon due to large class sizes and limited resources. To our knowledge, this research is among the first to examine the use of the most recent versions of large-scale speech models (Whisper V2 wav2vec2.0) for ORF assessment in the Global South. We find that Whisper V2 produces transcriptions of Ghanaian students reading aloud with a Word Error Rate of 13.5. This is close to the model's average WER on adult speech (12.8) and would have been considered state-of-the-art for children's speech transcription only a few years ago. We also find that when these transcriptions are used to produce fully automated ORF scores, they closely align with scores generated by expert human graders, with a correlation coefficient of 0.96. Importantly, these results were achieved on a representative dataset (i.e., students with regional accents, recordings taken in actual classrooms), using a free and publicly available speech model out of the box (i.e., no fine-tuning). This suggests that using large-scale speech models to assess ORF may be feasible to implement and scale in lower-resource, linguistically diverse educational contexts.