The aim of the research reported on here is to develop a system for automatic assessment of foreign speakers' pronunciation of Dutch. In this paper similar studies carried out for English are first examined. Subsequently, suggestions are made for partly improving the methodology that is usually adopted in research on automatic pronunciation assessment. Finally, an experiment is presented in which automatic scores of telephone speech produced by native and nonnative speakers are compared with scores assigned by human raters. The approach used in this experiment is compared with those of previous studies.