This paper offers a comparison of two resources for Polish adult learners of English. The first has been designed for Polish-English Literacy Tutor (PELT), a multimodal system for foreign language learning, as training input to speech recognition system for highly accented, strongly variable second language speech. The second corpus is a task-specific resource designed in the PELT framework to investigate the vowel space of English produced by Poles. Presented are linguistically and technologically challenging aspects of the two ventures and their complementary character.