• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.261-286
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• 2005

Lately, teaching methods and instruments have become student-centered and are directed towards developing a communicative competence of learners. However, compared with that of other countries, the level of our students English is not very good. I guess the reason is that our English education is focused on the uniformal teaching methods regardless of the differences of intelligence, affective domains and study time. I tried to find the relationship between these factors and the students' English accomplishments. So I divided the students into 2 groups of superior and inferior students by the standard of intelligence, affective domain and study time and compared the scores between the groups in the fields of reading comprehension, grammar, pronunciation, accent, vocabulary, and listening. These were the results that followed: First, intelligence has a great influence students' English accomplishment in all fields. Second, affective domains such as motivation, anxiety, attitude, confidence, and studying time also have some influence on the students' English accomplishments. Third, the sequence of these factors according to their influence force are as follows: study time, anxiety, intelligence, motivation, attitude, and confidence. So we can conclude that we should teach English according to our students' ability in the field of intelligence and affective domains and should not ignore the individual differences they have.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.427-452
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• 2003

Korean is famous for having all voiceless stop sounds. Korean does have voiced stops but they are considered to exist only as the allophones of word initial /p, t, k/. My experiment shows the English word initial stop sounds [b, d, g] and the Korean lax stop series /p, t, k/ in word initial position are similar in the range of voice onset time. If English word initial[b, d, g] sounds are posited as voiced, then Korean word initial /p, t, k/ should be classified as voiced also. Phonetically English /b, d, g/ phonemes and Korean /p, t, k/ phonemes are very similar except the word initial [p, t, k] are devoiced slightly more, but not significant enough to be classified as voiceless than English word initial [b, d, g]. If we posit /b, d, g/ as Korean phonemes, it explains why Korean /p, t, k/ series has the allophones [b, d, g] instead of fortis stops /p', t', k'/ in Korean even though /p', t', k'/ has less positive VOT value than /p, t, k/. If we posit /b, d, g/ as Korean phonemes, then it does not cause spelling or pronunciation confusion either when Koreans learn English or English speakers learn Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.3-9
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• 2009

Acoustically English vowels are defined primarily by formant values. The measurements of the values have been usually made at a few time points of the vowel segment despite the fact that the majority of English vowel formants vary dynamically throughout the segment. This study attempts to collect acoustic data of the nine English vowels published by Hillenbrand et al. (1995) online and to examine the acoustic features of the English vowels for phoneticians and English teachers. The author used Praat to obtain the data systematically at six equidistant timepoints over the vowel segment. Obvious errors were corrected based on the spectrographic display of each vowel. Results show that the first two formant trajectories are important to separate the nine vowels within the front- or back-vowel groups. The third formant trajectories appear comparable except those of the high vowels. Second, the back vowels leave longer traces on the vowel space toward the locus of the following consonant /d/. Third, each vowel has inherent duration, pitch, and intensity patterns. The results match the findings of Yang (2009). From the results, the author concludes that dynamic spectral changes are important in specifying acoustic characteristics of English vowels. Further studies on the application of the vowel trajectories to English pronunciation lessons or on perceptual experiment of synthesized vowels are desirable.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.22 no.10
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• pp.437-444
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• 2022

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of Read Along by Google with primary English learners' pronunciation and affective domains. In order to answer these two questions, a 4-week pilot study was conducted with 24 participants in the 6 th grade. Read Along as a main learning tool was utilized for a reading-aloud activity, and a pre-/post pronunciation test and survey on the affective factors were distributed as a research instrument. The results indicated that a read-aloud activity with Read Along brought a positive impact on the development of learners' pronunciation ability in terms of accuracy and fluency. Participants showed improvement in the post-pronunciation test, compared to the pre-one and there was a significant difference based on the result of the paired samples t-test. Next, the results of the survey on the affective domains illustrated that participants showed overall improvement in learning interest and confidence and there was a significant difference in these factors. Yet, there was not a significant difference in the learning attitude, even though they showed partial improvement.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.51-66
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• 2022

This study aims to help Korean English learners to learn English pronunciation by revealing which suprasegmentals affect the implementation of English sentences closer to native English speakers when they read English sentences. To this end, Korean middle school English learners were selected as subjects and research data were gathered through sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamative), as well as syllables. Speech rate, pause frequency, pause duration, F0 range, and rhythm among suprasegmentals were used for analysis of these English sentence utterances. Mean analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis were performed. The results showed that speech rate, pause frequency, pause duration, and F0 range affected the evaluation of fluency levels. In the regression analysis between all suprasegmentals and fluency levels, the suprasegmentals that most affected fluency levels were speech rate and F0 range. Rhythm had no meaningful relation with fluency levels. Therefore, when teaching English pronunciation, it is necessary to teach students to increase their speech rate and F0 range. In addition, students should be trained to reduce both the number and the duration of pauses during utterance to improve their fluency. It is noteworthy that of the four sentence types, exclamative sentences were produced with faster speech rate, fewer pauses, shorter pause duration, and higher rhythm values.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.23-27
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to find how English vowels /a, e, i, o, u/ affect the production of English labials /p, b, f, v/ by Korean learners of English. Sixty syllables were composed by five vowels and four labials in the syllable types CV, VC, and VCV. The nonsense syllables were produced three times by nine subjects. The major results show that (1) in inter-vocalic position, the subjects had higher scores in producing /v/ composed with /a, e, o/ and /u/, while subjects had lower scores in producing /p/ with /i/ and /o/, (2) in post-vocalic position, the subjects had higher scores in producing /v/ and /f/ with /a, e/, and /o/, while subjects had lower scores in producing /b/ with /e/ and /i/, and (3) in pre-vocalic position, the subjects had higher scores in producing /v/ with /e, o, u/ and /f/ with /u/, while subjects had lower scores in producing /b/ with /e/, /i/ and /u/. The results suggest that on the whole, Korean learners of English have much difficulty in producing /p/ with /i/ in inter-vocalic condition and /b/ with /i, /e/ in pre-vocalic position.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.123-147
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• 2002

As far as the recent ELT research concerned, it seems to have been no hot ‘theoretical’ issues, but ‘practical’ ones in general: e.g., learners and learning, components of proficiency, correlates of L2 learning, etc. This paper focuses on the theme given above, with a special reference to the sub-title: specifically, 1) World English, world Englishes and world's lingua franca; 2) ENL, ESL and EFL; 3) Grammars, style manuals, dictionaries and media; 4) Pronunciation models: RP, BBC model and General American, Network Standard; 5) Lexical, grammatical variations and discourse grammars; 6) Beliefs and subjective theories in foreign language research; 7) Dilemma among radical, canonical and eclectic views. In conclusion, the author offers a modest proposal: we need to appeal to our own experience, intention, feeling and purpose, that is, our identity to express “our own selves” in our contexts toward the world anywhere, if not sounding authentic enough, but producing it plausibly well. It is time for us (with our ethno-cultural autonomy) to need to be complementary to and parallel with its native speakers' linguistic-cultural authenticity in terms of the broadest mutual understanding.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.169-186
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• 2000

This paper aims to confirm the mispronunciation of native Korean students due to the phonetic and phonological system differences between English and Korean, and to find the works-to-do by experiment. Many Korean students tend to differentiate the sounds of word-final stop consonants not by vowel duration or the allophones but by the phoneme of the consonant itself. In English, Stop sounds change through the conditions of the aspirated, unaspirated, or unreleased sounds. But in Korean they are not allophones of phonemes but distinct phonemes. Therefore, many Korean students are apt to add an extra vowel sound /i/ after the final stop consonant in the eve form due to both the unperception of the differences between the phonemes and the allophones of stop consonants, and the influence of the Korean sound-sequence relationship. Since the replacement of the allophones and extra vowel addition does not change the meaning, the importance was almost lost. Nevertheless, this kind of study is essential for the precise learning and the use of the English language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.3-18
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• 2009

Do loanword properties emerge in the acquisition of a foreign language and if so, how? Classic studies in adult language learning assumed loanword properties that range from near-ceiling to near-chance level of appearance depending on speech proficiency. The present research argues that such variations reflect different phonological types, rather than speech proficiency. To investigate the difference between learner speech and loanword phonology, the current research analyzes the speech data from five different proficiency levels of 92 Korean speakers who read 19 pairs of English words and sentences that contained loanwords. The experimental method is primarily an acoustical one, by which the phonological cause in the loanwords (e.g., the insertion of [$\Box$] at the end of the word stamp) would be attested to appear in learner speech, in comparison with native speech from 11 English speakers and 11 Korean speakers. The data investigated for the research are of segment deletion, insertion, substitution, and alternation in both learner speech and the native speech. The results indicate that learner speech does not present the loanword properties in many cases, but depends on the types of phonological causes. The relatively easy acquisition of target pronunciation is evidenced in the cases of segment deletion, insertion, substitution, and alternation, except when the loanword property involves the successful command of the target phonology such as the de-aspiration of [p] in apple. Such a case of difficult learning draws a sharp distinction from the cases of easy learning in the development of learner speech, particularly beyond the intermediate level of proficiency. Overall, learner speech departs from loanword phonology and develops toward the native speech value, depending on phonological contrasts in the native and foreign languages.

• MALSORI
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• no.40
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• pp.79-89
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• 2000

한국어와 영어는 서로 다른 음소 배열 제약과 음운 규칙을 가지고 있기 때문에 영어 학습자들은 특정 영어 자음군을 정확하게 발음하는 데 어려움을 겪게 된다 따라서 이 논문은 영어 학습자들이 어떤 영어 자음군을 배우기 어려워 하고 왜 이러한 어려움이 생겨나는지 한국어와 영어의 음소 배열 제약과 음운 규칙을 비교해서 밝히는 것을 목적으로 한다.