• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 1997.07a
• /
• pp.217-219
• /
• 1997

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 1996.10a
• /
• pp.214-223
• /
• 1996

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2000.07a
• /
• pp.7-16
• /
• 2000

It is a great honour for me to speak to you today on the Korean's problems in learning English pronunciation. First of all I would like to thank Prof. H. B. Lee, President of the Phonetic Society of Korea for calling upon me to make a keynote speech at this International Conference on Phonetic Sciences. The year before last when the 1 st Joint Summit on English Phonetics was held at Aichi Gakuin University in Japan, the warm hospitality given to me and my colleagues by the English Phonetic Society of Japan was so great that I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to the members of the English Phonetic Society of Japan and especially to Prof. Masaki Tsuzuki, President of the Society. Korean learners of English have a lot of problems in learning English pronunciation. Some vowel problems seem to be shared by Japanese learners but other problems, especially in consonants, are peculiar to Koreans owing to the nature of phonological rules peculiar to the Korean language. Of course, there are other important problems like speech rhythm and intonation besides vowels and consonants. But they will not be included here because of limited time.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2000.07a
• /
• pp.283-300
• /
• 2000

This paper is intended to suggest how to improve Korean high school students' awareness of the pronunciation in order to foster communicative effectiveness. Initially it is focused on the tasks of listening to the suprasegmental aspects. The strategies used in the listening process are (1)discerning intonation units, (2)recognizing rhythm pattern, and (3)identifying contraction and linking in connected speech. The tasks including in each process are listening discrimination, guided practice activity, and listening and speaking activity. The teacher should avoid methods which yield discouraging outcomes and try to help students enjoy experience of success in doing exercises and activities. So I suggested: students put the slash on the pause perceptible to chunk the stream of speech into the intonation units, and mark the content words to internalize English rhythm. And then I suggested that students listen to pop song English in order to improve the awareness of function words and connected speech in the intonation unit.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.167-180
• /
• 2005

The present study examines the phonetic realizations of the unstressed weak vowel /e/ in English words produced by native and Korean ESL speakers. Traditionally, the stressed elements in utterance are considered to be prominent. In this sense, the unstressed weak vowel /e/ is predicted to be shorter in length, lower in pitch and intensity than the stressed vowels. The experiment shows that native English speakers correlate the unstressed weak vowel /e/ with both shorter duration and lower pitch; Korean ESL speakers correlate it with lower pitch only. We cannot find any significant statistical difference in intensity between /e/ and the stressed vowels in both cases. This study suggests it is important to acquire and produce the correct prosodic correlates of the unstressed weak vowel /e/ for Korean ESL speakers to command more natural English intonation, since /e/ is the most common vowel in English speech and consists of the English foot rhythm along with stressed vowels.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.3 no.3
• /
• pp.77-88
• /
• 2011

Foreign accent in second language production depends heavily on the transfer of features from the first language. This study examines acoustic variations in segments and suprasegments by native and nonnative speakers of English, searching for patterns of the transfer and plausible indexes of foreign accent in English. The acoustic variations are analyzed with recorded read speech by 20 native English speakers and 50 Korean learners of English, in terms of vowel formants, vowel duration, and syllabic variation induced by stress. The results show that the acoustic measurements of vowel formants and vowel and syllable durations display difference between native speakers and nonnative speakers. The difference is robust in the production of lax vowels, diphthongs, and stressed syllables, namely the English-specific features. L1 transfer on L2 specification is found both at the segmental levels and at the suprasegmental levels. The transfer levels measured as groups and individuals further show a continuum of divergence from the native-like target. Overall, the eldest group, students who are in the graduate schools, shows more native-like patterns, suggesting weaker foreign accent in English, whereas the high school students tend to involve larger deviation from the native speakers' patterns. Individual results show interdependence between segmental transfer and prosodic transfer, and correlation with self-reported proficiency levels. Additionally, experience factors in English such as length of English study and length of residence in English speaking countries are further discussed as factors to explain the acoustic variation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.3
• /
• pp.3-11
• /
• 2015

This study compared English and Korean speakers with regard to the nasalization of the English stops /b, d, g, p, t, k/before a nasal within and across a word boundary. Nine English and thirty Korean speakers participated in the experiment. We used 37 speech items with different grammatical structures. Overall the English informants rarely nasalized the stops while the Korean informants generally greatly nasalized them though widely varying from no nasalization to almost complete nasalization. In general, voiced stops were more likely to be nasalized than voiceless stops. Also, the alveolar stops /d, t/tended to be nasalized the most, the bilabial stops /b, p/ the second most, and the velar stops /g, k/ the least. Besides, the closer the grammatical relationship between neighboring words, the more likely the stop nasalization occurred. In contrast, the Korean syllabification - the addition of the vowel /i/ to the final stops - worked against the stop nasalization. On the other hand, different stress (accent) or rhythm effects of the two languages are assumed to contribute to the significantly different nasalization between English and Korean speakers. The spectrum of stop nasalization obtained from this study can be used as an index to measure how close a certain Korean speaker's stop nasalization is to English speakers'.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 1996.02a
• /
• pp.47-61
• /
• 1996

The phonetic study of English language in Japan is a matter of great importance, a problem of major concern and a. vital subject The special difficulties which the Japanese college students have in learning English lie in the field of prosodic features of English, such as, syllable, rhythm, stress, intonation, prominence, of.. These difficulties have made Japanese students' pronunciation relatively monotonous or mora(ness). In my presentation, the specific phonetic features of Japanese language first will be discussed and clarified. And then the effective teaching method of intonation to improve Japanese students' pronunciation will be suggested. Finally, the oral dialogue with intonation analysis and transcription in the class room will be demonstrated to highlight the presentation.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2004.05a
• /
• pp.245-249
• /
• 2004

The aim of this paper is to show the possibilities of the proficiency -based and integrated teaching of High School English reading and listening based on sense group and utterance restructuring. The proficiency -based and integrated listening and reading activities in stages are as follows. Step1, students fill in the blanks with strong or weak sounding words according to their abilities. Step2, speak along (track) based on restructuring and post-lexical phenomena while listening to the sentence. Step3, read and understand directly the passage, which have been marked the differentiated places where a native speaker of English would beat all likely to pause. Students need to listen to spoken English, so they recognize words in written and spoken form. They must be familiar with suprasegmental features, stress and rhythm, and post-lexical phenomena during reading activities.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2000.07a
• /
• pp.105-116
• /
• 2000

How to teach intelligible, communicative pronunciation is a continuous question in the English education. Without good input, we can not expect good output. However, in EFL situation, it is very difficult to input the good English pronunciation, therefore, we have to find out the efficient and effective material for teaching pronunciation. One of the materials is song, because songs contain the linguistic and cultural traits of the language. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the reason why songs are good for teaching pronunciation. Koreans, who are syllable timed language users, have difficulties in English pronunciation of stress, rhythm, consonants cluster, linking or blending in connected speech. The 134 songs from wee sing are analyzed for how these traits show in songs. The result shows that we can acquire the traits easily and naturally through songs. And a lesson plan is offered as an example for teaching songs.