What you're describing is called "speech verification". Language education is an application I'm personally very interested in, and one that almost no one discusses in the speech community (I assume because of machine translation), so if you find any research papers please let me know! I wrote a little about it: http://breandan.net/2014/02/09/the-end-of-illiteracy/

The task is actually much simpler than STT. You display some text on the screen, wait for an audio sample, then check the model's confidence that the sample matches the text. If the confidence is lower than some threshold, then you play the correct pronunciation through the speaker. The trick is doing this rapidly, so a fast local recognizer is key. I've got a little prototype on Android, and it's pretty neat for learning new words. I'd like to get it working for reading recitation, but that's a lot of work.

It should be possible to train a neural network to catch those special intonations, but it is IMHO substantially harder than the initial project, with uncertain results.

There's no reason one couldn't train 5 or 10 RNNs for transcription and ensemble them. (Indeed, one cute trick this ICLR was how to get an ensemble of NNs for free so you don't have to spend 5 or 10x time training: simply lower the learning rate during training until it stops improving, save the model, then jack the learning rate way up for a while and start lowering it until it stops improving, save that model, and when finished, now you have _n_ models you can ensemble.) And computing hardware is cheaper than humans, so it will be cheaper to have 5 or 10 RNNs process an audio file than it would be to have 2 or 3 humans independently check, so the ensembling advantage is actually bigger for the NNs in this scenario.

Humans still have the advantage of more semantic understanding, but RNNs can be trained on much larger corpuses and read all related transcripts, so even there the human advantage is not guaranteed.