The invention provides an automatic grading method and automatic grading equipment for read questions in a test of spoken English. According to the automatic grading method, preprocessing is carried out on input voice; the preprocessing comprises framing processing; phonetic feature is extracted from the preprocessed voice; by means of a linear grammar network and an acoustic model set up by reading texts, phonetic feature vector order is forcedly aligned to acquire information of the each break point of each phoneme; according to the information of the each break point of each phoneme, the posterior probability of each phoneme is calculated; based on the posterior probability of each phoneme, multi-dimensional grading characteristics are extracted; and based on the grading characteristics and manual grading information, a nonlinear regression model is trained by means of a support vector regression method, so that the nonlinear regression model is utilized to grade on reading of spoken English. The grading model is trained by means of expert scoring data, and therefore a result of machining grading is guaranteed not to deviate from a manual grading result in statistics, and the high simulation of a computer on the expert grading is achieved.