  People have long hoped for a conversational system that can assist in
real-life situations, and recent progress on large language models (LLMs) is
bringing this idea closer to reality. While LLMs are often impressive in
performance, their efficacy in real-world scenarios that demand expert
knowledge remains unclear. LLMs are believed to hold the most potential and
value in education, especially in the development of Artificial intelligence
(AI) based virtual teachers capable of facilitating language learning. Our
focus is centered on evaluating the efficacy of LLMs in the realm of education,
specifically in the areas of spoken language learning which encompass
phonetics, phonology, and second language acquisition. We introduce a new
multiple-choice question dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in the
aforementioned scenarios, including understanding and application of spoken
language knowledge. In addition, we investigate the influence of various
prompting techniques such as zero- and few-shot method (prepending the question
with question-answer exemplars), chain-of-thought (CoT, think step-by-step),
in-domain exampler and external tools (Google, Wikipedia). We conducted
large-scale evaluation on popular LLMs (20 distinct models) using these
methods. We achieved significant performance improvements compared to the
zero-shot baseline in the practical questions reasoning (GPT-3.5, 49.1% ->
63.1%; LLaMA2-70B-Chat, 42.2% -> 48.6%). We found that models of different
sizes have good understanding of concepts in phonetics, phonology, and second
language acquisition, but show limitations in reasoning for real-world
problems. Additionally, we also explore preliminary findings on conversational
communication.
