• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.19-25
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• 2020

This study examined thirty-one Korean students' pronunciation of an English passage using a speech recognition application, Speechnotes, and two Canadian raters' evaluations of their speech according to the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) band criteria to assess the possibility of using the application as a teaching aid for pronunciation education. The results showed that the grand average percentage of correctly recognized words was 77.7%. From the moderate recognition rate, the pronunciation level of the participants was construed as intermediate and higher. The recognition rate varied depending on the composition of the content words and the function words in each given sentence. Frequency counts of unrecognized words by group level and word type revealed the typical pronunciation problems of the participants, including fricatives and nasals. The IELTS bands chosen by the two native raters for the rainbow passage had a moderately high correlation with each other. A moderate correlation was reported between the number of correctly recognized content words and the raters' bands, while an almost a negligible correlation was found between the function words and the raters' bands. From these results, the author concludes that the speech recognition application could constitute a partial aid for diagnosing each individual's or the group's pronunciation problems, but further studies are still needed to match human raters.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.141-149
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• 2009

An emphasis on teaching suprasegmental features of English, specifically English rhythm, is essential in order to improve the 'intelligibility' of the pronunciation of Korean EFL learners among interlocutors who use English as a Lingua Franca(ELF). By redefining the ELF suggested by Jenkins (2000, 2002), this paper argues that Lingua Franca Core (LFC) must include suprasegmental features such as 'stress-based rhythm' and word stress. However, because 'isochrony' is difficult to measure in a foot, the rhythm unit must be expanded to an intonational phrase which has prominence in it and the rhythm of the unit can be measured by calculating the duration of each segment in context The rhythmic pattern of Korean learners of English and that of native speakers or other non-native English speakers can then be calculated and compared by using correlation coefficients of the segmental duration. In terms of sociolinguistic factors, improving the 'comprehensibility' and 'accentedness' of Korean EFL learners' pronunciation is also important in international communication, which calls for more emphasis on suprasegmental features.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.39-44
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to investigate the English pronunciation for high-leveled adult Korean speakers based on pronunciation proficiency test. For this purpose, one native English speaker and eight Korean speakers' suprasegmental features such as sentence F0, standard deviation of vowels and stressed / unstressed vowels' F0, duration and intensity were measured and analyzed. The major results show that (1) high-leveled adult Korean speakers' sentence F0 was similar to that of native English speaker, (2) vowel durations, were less diverse than those of native English speakers, and (3) high-leveled adult Korean speakers utilize vowel duration more actively than F0 to indicate the stress assignment of vowels.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.55-68
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• 2004

The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate the relationship between English pronunciation and listening comprehension of English diphthongs and low vowels of Korean college students from the Chungnam and Gyungnam provinces. Of 22 test sentences for listening comprehension, 15 sentences were recorded by native speakers and seven sentences were edited from Springboard by Oxford University Press. For the listening comprehension test, 90 subjects from two groups, Chungnam dialect speakers and Gyungnam dialect speakers, were selected. They listened to 22 sentences produced by audio cassette tape and completed a cloze exercise. By the results of this experiment, we observed that Korean collegians of Gyungnam province showed a better listening comprehension of words including front low vowels when they preceded voiced sounds than those of Chungnam province. When the back low vowel came in an open syllable, we also recognized the same result; Gyungnam province collegians showed better listening comprehension of words including back low vowels than those of Chungnam province. As the results of Hee-Suk Park & Jung-Soak Kim(2003) showed that Gyungnam province collegians pronounced the English low vowels longer than Chungnam province collegians, we discovered that there was a positive relation between English pronunciation and listening comprehension, especially in Gyungnam province collegians. However regarding words including English diphthongs we discovered almost no relation between English pronunciation and listening comprehension.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.02a
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• pp.79-84
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• 1996

The two existing romanization systems in Korea, namely the recently promulgated Ministry of Education version sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences incorporating for the most part the McCune-Reischauer system and the Hangeul Haghoe or the Korean Language Society's version, must be judged as failures: He fennel for its disregard of Korean orthography and pronunciation, use of Latin-oriented pronunciation despite its assertion that English is the standard used, and the greatest weakness of all, its use of phonetic symbols neither found in regular typewriters, teleprinters, word processors and telex machines nor understood by laymen, sometimes not even by specialists. And the latter suffers from its undue emphasis on Korean orthography, Latin-oriented pronunciation being only partly capable of representing Korean pronunciation, among other shortcomings. Since the two existing romanization systems of Korean in South Korea, and romanization system of Japanese with Latin-oriented pronunciation are woefully inadequate, in today's world where English is used as if it were the international language almost all over the world, the present writer has invented a completely new system of romanizing Korean and Japanese by the so-called pseudo-phonetic method. This method employs the roman letters only and uses thorn in place of phonetic symbols as long as the letters thus applied are believed to have constant sound value. The English pronunciation is the standard used for this system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.69-75
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• 2010

We propose an automatic pronunciation diagnosis system to evaluate the pronunciation of a foreign language without the uttered text. We recorded English utterances spoken by native and Korean speakers, and utterances spoken by Koreans are evaluated by native speakers based on three criteria: fluency, accuracy of phones and intonation. The system evaluates the utterances of test Korean speakers based on the differences of log-likelihood given two models: one is trained by English speech uttered by native speakers, and the other is trained by English speech uttered by Korean speakers. We also applied purification algorithm to increase class differentiability. The purification can detect and eliminate the non-speech frames such as short pauses, occlusive silences that do not help to discriminate between utterances. As the results, our proposed system has higher correlation with the human scores than the baseline system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.73-84
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• 2009

Despite the growing interest among researchers in the field of second language (L2) phonological acquisition and its apparent contribution to linguistic and acquisition theories, there have been concerns about the lack of pedagogical application of the research findings in L2 classrooms (Levis, 1999, Derwing & Munro, 2005). Based on the belief that meeting an existing pedagogic need is something that should receive primary attention in SLA, this study attempts to bridge the gap between L2 pronunciation research and pronunciation pedagogy. In so doing, this study provides a narrative literature review of papers on L2 pronunciation published from 1994 to 2008 in Korea. The articles for review were retrieved from five database search engines. In addition, six journals where relevant articles most frequently appeared were selected and electronic searches of these six journals were conducted. A total of 117 articles which met the selection criteria were collected, and were reviewed to answer the following three research questions: a) What are the current research trends in L2 pronunciation in Korea? b) Do the research trends reflect a shift of focus on L2 pronunciation teaching? and c) What is the range of research practices in L2 pronunciation? The review of the papers indicates that the number of studies on L2 pronunciation increased sharply from 1999 to 2003. Some changes in research topics were also noticed. Research on segmental features of English was dominant from 1994 to 1998, but became more balanced with research on suprasegmentals from 2004 to 2008. This review also discusses the range of research practices in L2 pronunciation and makes suggestions for future directions in L2 pronunciation research.

• MALSORI
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• no.41
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• pp.1-18
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• 2001

The purpose of this paper is to slove problems with English pronunciation education and to correct the misbelief that misbelief that English pronunciation can be thught effectiverly by native speakers or good speakers. Best sellers have many mistakes even in the description of sounds and most English education departments in national universities teach English phonetics theoretically only for 1 semester, More than 10 years' investigation into native speakers' and good speakers' teaching methods in various ways confirmed that they couldn't know English phonetics teachers should have a theoretical and practical knowledge of phonetics of English and students' dialects and the abilities to find the same or similar English sounds their students can make in normal or abnormal situations, to make both correct sounds and incorrect ones their students can make and to make them perceive the differences by using various ways.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.255-270
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• 2000

Because the accuracy is essential, in order to get the fluency in speaking, both of them are very important in English education and in-service training programs. To get the accuracy and the fluency, the causes and phenomena of the unnatural pronunciation have to be surveyed first of all. Therefore, this article surveyed the problematic and unnatural pronunciation of Korean English teachers in elementary and secondary schools using CSL and Multi-speech. And also, tried to pinpoint what the causes of unnatural pronunciation are\ulcorner Next a procedure or steps were offered for them to speak naturally through in-service training programs. Through this analysis, it was found that elementary teachers have unnatural pronunciation below, within and beyond word level, and the secondary teacher has unnatural pronunciation within and beyond word level. Therefore, pronunciation training courses have to put emphasis on segment features first, and move to suprasegmental features for elementary teachers. For secondary teachers, pronunciation training courses have to focus on word level and move to suprasegmental features, in other words beyond word level. And these pronunciation training courses have to be run integrated.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.37-54
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• 2002

Some Korean speakers have trouble in learning the correct pronunciation of many complex English words which have clusters in their onset and coda position. This study shows that the difficulties Korean students have acquiring English pronunciation partly come from syllable structure differences between English and Korean. We provide an analysis based on Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) of the syllable structure difference and suggest that Korean speakers learn the different constraint ranking between English and Korean. This will offer Korean speakers with some helpful methods which will facilitate their learning.