• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.17-35
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of an explicit word instruction for EFL beginning readers and their perception on the learning experience. Data were attained from 16 fourth graders who took English class as a development activity. Data include the results of pre- and post-test of high frequency sight word recognition, oral reading ability, students' survey responses, and teacher observation. The descriptive statistics were obtained for the result of the pre- and post-test. The findings from the student survey and teacher observation were also provided and interpreted to better understand the result of project and students' perception on the learning experience. The followings are the results of this study. The word recognition ability of the students was dramatically improved after the project. The students were satisfied with the overall learning experience perceiving it as helpful and fun learning. They expressed that the explicit word instruction helped their word recognition and reading ability. The results also supported that the confidence of students on their reading ability were heightened. Several suggestions are made for teachers and researchers on the word instruction for young EFL learners who are beginning readers.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.245-253
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• 2000

In this paper, we implement an elementary system to correct accents and pronunciations in English words spoken by non-native English speakers. In case of the accent evaluation, energy and pitch information are used to find stressed syllables, and then we extract the segment information of input patterns using a dynamic time warping method to discriminate and evaluate accent position. For the pronunciation evaluation, we utilize the segment information using the same algorithm as in accent evaluation, and perform the spectral distance measure for each phoneme between input patterns and reference patterns. Based on these spectral distances, we decide whether to recommend the pronunciation correction or not. Our results show that 98 percent of accent and 71 percent of pronunciation evaluation agree with the perceptual measure.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.127-136
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• 2020

This paper presents an environment for rule-based English-Korean machine translation system, which supports the translation domain adaptation and the continuous translation quality improvement. For the purposes, corpus is essential, from which necessary information for translation will be acquired. The environment consists of a corpus construction part and a translation knowledge extraction part. The corpus construction part crawls news articles from some newspaper sites. The extraction part builds the translation knowledge such as newly-created words, compound words, collocation information, distributional word representations, and so on. For the translation domain adaption, the corpus for the domain should be built and the translation knowledge should be constructed from the corpus. For the continuous improvement, corpus needs to be continuously expanded and the translation knowledge should be enhanced from the expanded corpus. The proposed web-based environment is expected to facilitate the tasks of domain adaptation and translation system improvement.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.37-44
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• 2021

Preliminary findings are reported from five experiments testing the perceived naturalness of word tokens whose vowel durations are altered. The stimuli were minimal pairs of English words ending in a voiced/voiceless plosive. Results show an asymmetric effect of shortening and lengthening of the vowel on the perceived naturalness of the word. Incremental shortening of vowel duration initially shows a stable degree of perceived naturalness but rapidly deteriorates beyond a certain point. On the contrary, only a small degree of lengthening of the vowel made the perceived naturalness of the word quickly decay, but there was a floor effect such that the perceived degree of naturalness does not lower beyond a certain level. Further, the tokens with the original vowel duration were not always scored higher than the stimuli with a small degree of shortening. Future studies should address the issue of speaking rate and the ratio between the vowel and the stop closure duration to better understand the phenomenon. The issue investigated here has implications on the role of prototypical exemplars in the perception of phonotactic naturalness.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.55-62
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• 2019

This paper investigates the phonological processes of consonants in pronounced words in the Buckeye Corpus and compares the frequency distribution of these processes to provide a clearer understanding of conversational English for linguists and teachers. Both orthographic and pronounced words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Buckeye Corpus. Next, the phonological processes of consonants in the orthographic and pronounced labels were tabulated separately by onsets and codas, and a frequency distribution by consonant process types was examined. The results showed that the majority of the onset clusters were pronounced as the same sounds in the Buckeye Corpus. The participants in the corpus were presumed to speak semiformally. In addition, the onsets have fewer deletions than the codas, which might be related to the information weight of the syllable components. Moreover, there is a significant association and strong positive correlation between the phonological processes of the onsets and codas in men and women. This paper concludes that an analysis of phonological processes in spontaneous speech corpora can contribute to a practical understanding of spoken English. Further studies comparing the current phonological process data with those of other languages would be desirable to establish universal patterns in phonological processes.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.21-29
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• 2007

The necessity for improving the English listening ability of Korean learners has been emphasized since the ultimate goal of English education converted to CLT(Communicative Language Teaching) in Korea. Verbotonal Approach as an auditory-based strategy has been proved to be effective substantially in maximizing the listening skill of spoken foreign language. The purpose of this study is to find out an efficient way of improving listening ability for Korean middle school students by employing OFH(Optimal Frequency of Hearing) using Tonality Word Sentence Test, before & after using Listen II Verbotonal training unit based on VTS(Verbotonal System). The results of the listening tests showed that the listening ability of the subjects increased by 16.7% on the words and by 5.5% on the sentences after using Listen II, compared with before using Listen II and that the improvement rate of listening ability on the level of words is much higher than that on the level of sentences. From the results, we can come to a conclusion that training the listening skill with words in mid-tonality and low-tonality based on OFH might give a great positive effect in improving listening ability for Korean learners of English.