Virtual Reality-Based Educational Game for Basic Korean Pronunciation Assessment

In today’s globalized world, proficiency in foreign languages, such as Korean, is of paramount importance. While pronunciation is a fundamental aspect of language acquisition, conventional assessment techniques are constrained by limitations such as the subjectivity of human judgment, learners’ discomfort during live examination, and teachers’ limited time to assess. This research presents the development of an educational game based on virtual reality (VR) designed to assess basic Korean pronunciation, with the aim of overcoming the aforementioned problems. This study also evaluates the effectiveness of the developed application, assessing several key measures: usability, user experience and comfort, and the alignment of the developed system assessment results with human judgment. The methodology used in this research is agile method for development, black box testing, evaluation of usability and user experience, and correlation test between the system assessment and the manual human assessment. The app showed good usability with an SUS score of 72.625 and positive UEQ scores for attractiveness (2.225), perspicuity (1.838), stimulation (2.313), and novelty (1.863). A Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.631 indicated significant agreement between system and human assessments. The study demonstrates that the VR-based educational game effectively facilitates impartial Korean pronunciation assessment, enhances user experience, and reduces manual assessment time for teachers by automating the process.