• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.1
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• pp.109-127
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• 1995

Due to frequent international exchanges, there has been much emphasis on communication proficiency in foreign language education. However, when we look back upon teaching English in Korea over past years, we find that English teaching has been dominated mainly by Grammar-Translation Method, which makes teachers and students pay little attention to listening skill that is regarded as the basis of communication proficiency. Recently many English teachers have shown their interest in listening skill, so they come to use the textbook record tapes to improve listening skill. But listening training by textbook record tapes seems to make students feel bored. So the purpose of this study is to suggest an effective way of improving listening skill by means of Pop Songs that the students are indulged in. The processes of this study consist of three stages : 1) listening to songs, 2) explanation about structures and vocabularies in songs, 3) filling in blanks while listening. The subjects in this study are freshmen 88 students in girls' High School They are grouped into two : one is experimental group and the other control group. Among the subjects, the former have been taught by the lesson plan using pop songs, while the latter by the lesson plan using textbook record tapes. The experiment lasts about 9 months (from March to November, l994) The data for analyzing the study results have been collected from two kinds of tests : one is listening test and the other comprehensive test. The hypothesises of this study areas follows : 1) Depending on hearing materials (experimental material vs traditional material), there will be a difference in scores of listening skills between EG (experimental group) and CG (control group), 2) Depending on the interest on pop songs, there will be a difference in scores of hearing skills in CG, 3) Depending on hearing material. there will be a difference in scores of overall English skills between EG and CG, 4) Improvement in listening skill will give influence on the overall English scores. The findings of this study indicate that pop songs are effective to improve students' listening skill, that students' interest in the hearing material is important, and that listening skill is closely related to other skills, especially reading skill. It can be concluded that English teachers should make efforts to find the suitable listening materials which will help students to improve their listening proficiency effectively.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.15-24
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• 2015

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the use of video resources on improving listening comprehension. 86 students enrolled in a summer session at a Korean university participated in the study. They were assigned to one of three groups based on the results of their TOEIC test scores: 29 students were assigned to the low group, 29 students to the intermediate group, and 28 students to the advanced group. Each group studied the same lessons using authentic video materials. They were taught for 10 sessions over three weeks. The pre- and post-test design helped to determine whether authentic videos were effective in improving listening skills for all proficiency levels. In addition, a questionnaire investigated students' perceptions toward using video resources. Paired sample t-tests, ANOVAs, and an ANCOVA were utilized to identify significant differences. It was concluded that in the intermediate and advanced proficiency groups, the students' listening skills increased significantly after learning with videos. In addition, listening improvements among the intermediate and advanced students were much greater than those of the low proficiency group. As for students' perceptions toward using video resources for improving their English listening skills, they responded positively. Based on these findings, pedagogical implications are suggested, and future studies will be discussed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.77-89
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• 2007

This paper examined the intonation contours of English sentences produced by the Korean students. Thirty students participated in the speaking tasks made up of three parts: an oral interview, picture description and a conversational text reading. Their pronunciations in the parts were recorded on a minidisk. Then, two native instructors evaluated their proficiency level focusing on general intelligibility and suprasegmental aspects of the speech. Based on the results of evaluation they were divided into two groups: high and low proficiency groups. The pitch contours of three sentences produced by both the Korean students and a native speaker were compared to find any similarities and differences in the students' intonation patterns using Praat. Results showed that there was a moderate correlation in the proficiency scores of the students by the two native speakers. Secondly, students who earned high scores in the proficiency level matched better the native model. Thirdly, the high group students knew more on the pitch contour and tried to carefully realize them while fewer students in the low group answered positively on the questionnaire. In conclusion, English learners need to know the proper intonation patterns and to practice them consciously and sufficiently to realize correct intonation contours. Further studies would be desirable on the students' pronunciation focused on discourse structure.

• Child Studies in Asia-Pacific Contexts
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.17-29
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• 2016

To help define future research direction and enhance educational service for children from Asian and Latino immigrant backgrounds, this review examines research investigating social competence with reference to host and heritage language skills. A targeted search obtained 14 peer-reviewed studies published from 1994 to 2014 focusing on children aged from birth to 12 years. Social competence is mainly measured by four dimensions: externalizing behaviours, internalizing behaviours, social skills and relationships with others. The evidence suggests that English proficiency levels are positively associated with social skills and parent-child relationships are of higher quality when parent-child heritage language difference is minimal. However the findings are mixed regarding how English levels are associated with externalizing, internalizing behaviours and relationships with others and how heritage language levels are associated with social competence. This review makes a set of recommendations for future research including assessment of participants' language proficiency with language tests and examination of emotional factors in the relationship between English and social competence. The implications of the findings are also discussed for educators.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.213-216
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is to observe how Korean learners with low (KL) and high (KH) English proficiency manifest English rhythm with respect to the relative temporal stability or temporal constraint of syllable. In this study, speech cycling task, repeating a short phrase with the series of beeps of same interval, was used to examine temporal distribution of stressed beats.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.9-20
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• 2002

This paper is to verify the effects of English immersion program through the case study of the three and an half week English camp run by Hongik University. The student's proficiency in English varies according to different factors. Another goal of this paper is to pin down certain objective factors that have an effect on the English proficiency and the improvement of the proficient. The generalized linear model(GLM) is adopted for the related analyses in this paper.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.209-224
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• 2009

This study examined the role of contextual knowledge in cross-cultural communication between non-native speakers on an interactive web with a bulletin board system through which college students of English at Japanese and Korean universities interacted with each other discussing the topics of local and global issues. The study investigated the influence of students' relative contextual knowledge on active participation in interactions and discussed the results focusing on the use of discourse strategies for meaning negotiation. The study argues that in interactions even between non-native speakers with limited proficiency, contextual knowledge in the topic under discussion affects the degree to which they accommodate to each other during communication and suggests that the focus of teaching English as a foreign language also should be given to what kind of contextual knowledge students need to obtain and how to express it rather than what level of proficiency in English they need to acquire.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.87-103
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• 2004

This study investigates Korean listeners' perception of the English stop epenthesis between the sonorant and fricative segments. Specifically this study investigates 1) how often English epenthetic stops are perceived by native Korean listeners, given the fact that Korean does not allow consonant clusters in codas; and 2) whether perception of the epenthetic stops, which are optional phonetic variations, not phonemes, could be improved without any explicit training. 120 English non-words with a mono-syllable structure of CVC1C2, where C1=/m, n, $\eta$, 1/, and C2=/s, $\theta$, $\int$/, were given to two groups of native Korean listeners, and they were asked to detect the target stops such as [p], [t], and [k]. The number of their responses were computed to determine how often listeners succeed in recovering the string of segments produced by the native English speaker. The results of the present study show that English epenthetic stops are poorly identified by native Korean listeners with low English proficiency, even in the case where stimuli with strong acoustic cues are provided with, but perception of epenthetic stops is closely related with listeners' English proficiency, showing the possibility of the improvement of perception. It further shows that perception of epenthetic stops shows asymmetry between coronal and non-coronal consonants.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.1-9
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• 2022

The current study examined English-speaking adult learners' production and perception of L2 Korean stops (/t/ or /t'/ or /t^h/) to investigate whether the two modalities are linked in utilizing voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) for the L2 sound distinction and how the learners' L2 proficiency mediates the relationship. Twenty-two English-speaking learners of Korean living in Seoul participated in the word-reading task of producing stop-initial words and the identification task of labelling CV stimuli synthesized to vary VOT and F0. Using logistic mixed-effects regression models, we quantified group- and individual-level weights of the VOT and F0 cues in differentiating the tense-lax, lax-aspirated, and tense-aspirated stops in Korean. The results showed that the learners as a group relied on VOT more than F0 both in production and perception (except the tense-lax pair), reflecting the dominant role of VOT in their L1 stop distinction. Individual-level analyses further revealed that the learners' L2 proficiency was related to their use of F0 in L2 production and their use of VOT in L2 perception. With this effect of L2 proficiency controlled in the partial correlation tests, we found a significant correlation between production and perception in using VOT and F0 for the lax-aspirated stop contrast. However, the same correlation was absent for the other stop pairs. We discuss a contrast-specific role of acoustic cues to address the non-uniform patterns of the production-perception link in the L2 sound learning context.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.175-183
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• 2005

In this study, realization of strong and weak syllables in English by Korean leaners with low English proficiency was examined through experiment. The aspects of three acoustic characteristics-duration, pitch, amplitude-were measured and compared with native speakers of English. It was assumed that production of duration, pitch and amplitude of strong and weak syllable by Korean learners would be different from that of English native speakers. According to the production experiments, English native speakers produced strong syllable longer, higher and louder than weak syllable. However, Korean leaners produced strong syllable higher and louder than weak syllable, but not longer enough. Specifically, weak syllable by Korean leaners was longer and strong syllable shorter than native speakers. Furthermore, the difference in duration of syllables between Korean leaners and English native speakers is more significant than pitch and amplitude. As a result, the duration was more important cue for the realization of stress than pitch and amplitude. However, Korean leaners did not produce duration of stressed syllables as English native speakers did, even though they produce the pitch and amplitude of stressed syllable in a similar way to native speakers. The reasons for those were considered, too.