• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.19-33
• /
• 2019

This paper examines the perception of Korean phonemes by Egyptian learners of Korean and presents the learnability gradient of Korean consonants and vowels through High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT). 50 Egyptian learners of Korean (27 low proficiency learners and 23 high proficiency learners) participated in 10 sessions of HVPT for Korean vowels, word initial and final consonants. Participants were tested on their identification ability of Korean vowels, word initial consonants, and syllable codas before and after the training. The results showed that both low and high proficiency groups did benefit from the training. Low proficiency learners showed a higher improvement rate than high proficiency learners. Based on the HVPT results, a learnability gradient was established to give insights into priorities in teaching Korean sounds to Egyptian learners.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.1-8
• /
• 2019

This study aims to investigate how prosodic prominence is perceived in relation to word class information (or parts-of-speech) by Korean learners of English compared with native English speakers in public speech. Two groups, Korean learners of English and native English speakers, were asked to judge words perceived as prominent simultaneously while listening to a speech. Parts-of-speech and three acoustic cues (i.e., max F0, mean phone duration, and mean intensity) were analyzed for each word in the speech. The results showed that content words tended to be higher in pitch and longer in duration than function words. Both groups of listeners rated prominence on content words more frequently than on function words. This tendency, however, was significantly greater for Korean learners of English than for native English speakers. Among the parts-of-speech of the content words, Korean learners of English were more likely than native English speakers to judge nouns and verbs as prominent. This study presents evidence that Korean learners of English consider most, if not all, content words as landing locations of prosodic prominence, in alignment with the previous study on the production of prominence.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.193-206
• /
• 2011

The purpose of the study is to examine the use of emotion vocabulary by Korean English learners. Three basic emotion fields, pleasure, anger, and fear were selected to elicit the participants' responses. L1 English speakers' data was also collected for comparison. The major results are as follows. First, English learners responded with various inappropriate verb forms like I feel~, I am~ while the majority of English native speaking teachers responded with subjunctive forms like I would feel~. In addition, L2 English learners used mostly simple and coordination sentences. Second, the lexical richness, measured through type/token ratio, was higher in English L1 data than in English L2 data. The proportion of emotion lemmas reflects the lexical richness or the diversity of the emotion words. Lastly, L2 English learners' responses focused on a few typical adjectives like happy, angry and scared. This structural and semantic distinctiveness of Korean English learners' emotion words was discussed from pedagogical perspectives.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.6
• /
• pp.1163-1190
• /
• 2010

Korean EFL learners' stylistic sensitivity was examined through the two types of letter writing, professional and personal. The base of comparison with the English native speakers' stylistic sensitivity was the linguistic style markers that were statistically found by Biber's (1988) multi-dimensional model of variation of English language. The main finding was that Korean university students were sensitive to stylistic difference in the correct direction, though their linguistic repertoire was limited to the easy and simple linguistic features. Also, the learners were skewed in the involved style in both types of the letters unlike the native speakers and it was interpreted as due to the general developmental direction from informal to formal linguistic style. Learners were also skewed in the explicit style in both types of letters unlike the native speakers and it was interpreted as due to the learners' heavy reliance on one particular linguistic feature. As a whole, the learners' stylistic sensitivity heavily relied on the small number of linguistic features that they have already acquired, which happen to be simple and basic linguistic features.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.63-70
• /
• 2019

This study investigated individual variability of L2 learners' categorical judgments of L2 stops by exploring English learners' perceptual processing of two acoustic cues (voice onset time [VOT] and f0) and working memory capacity as sources of variation. As prior research has reported that English speakers' greater use of the redundant cue f0 was responsible for gradient processing of native stops, we examined whether the same processing characteristics would be observed in L2 learners' perception of Korean stops (/t/-/t^h/). 22 English learners of L2 Korean with a range of L2 proficiency participated in a visual analogue scaling task and demonstrated variable manners of judging the L2 Korean stops: Some were more gradient than others in performing the task. Correlation analysis revealed that L2 learners' categorical responses were modestly related to individuals' utilizations of a primary cue for the stop contrast (VOT for L1 English stops and f0 for L2 Korean stops), and were also related to better working memory capacity. Together, the current experimental evidence demonstrates adult L2 learners' top-down processing of stop consonants where linguistic and cognitive resources are devoted to a process of determining abstract phonemic identity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.53 no.2
• /
• pp.335-357
• /
• 2007

This study aims to investigate the pragmatic features of Korean EFL learners' interlanguage in the communicative act of complaining. Since a complaint, by its nature, is likely to cause offence, thereby threatening the social relationship between the speaker and the hearer, making a complaint in a polite manner is of crucial importance in maintaining harmonious social relationships. However, very little research has been carried out on the complaint speech act performances of Korean EFL learners. In particular, studies which attempt to examine the effect of social status on the choice of complaint speech act strategies are rare. The present study compared the complaint speech act performances of Korean EFL learners and those of native speakers of English with respect to social status. 24 Korean EFL learners and 28 native speakers of English participated and the data were collected via a Discourse Completion Test. The findings revealed that Korean EFL learners differed from native English speakers in the use of complaint strategies. These results indicate that Korean EFL learners lack certain important skills necessary to make complaints appropriately, suggesting the need for the foreign language learners to develop a more extensive pragmatic knowledge of complaint strategies.

• Educational Technology International
• /
• v.17 no.1
• /
• pp.59-85
• /
• 2016

The purpose of the study is to report differences in the effects of learner characteristics on the self-regulated learning (SRL) abilities between Chinese and Korean distance learners by using a structured SRL scale. A standardized 54-item self-regulated learning scale (SRAS) was used. The reliability was tested both in China and Korea which showed the scale had good reliability. The comparative study were conducted by administering the SRAS on 1999 Chinese distance learners from the Open Distance Education Center of Beijing Normal University and 1941 Korean distance learners from H Cyber University. Data on four dimensions of SRL - planning, control, regulating, and evaluation - were analyzed using 't-test' and 'ANOVA' with regards to the learner characteristics such as gender, age, prior education level, semesters, location and major. Results indicated that the average participant had an above medium level of SRL ability in all of the four dimensions. There were significant differences in the self-regulated learning ability between Chinese and Korean distance learners. Chinese distance learners scored higher in SRAS than Korean distance learners. The effects of learner characteristics on the SRL ability showed different patterns in the two countries. As for gender, male learners scored better in SRL than female learners in China, whereas it was just the opposite in Korea. No age differences were found in China, but Korean data exhibited a consistent age effect in all dimensions. In Korea, the age group older than 46 scored the highest, followed by the group between 35 to 45 years old, the group between 26 to 35 years old and the group younger than 25. As for location, Korean distance students from metropolitan were better than those from other regions, whereas it was on the contrary in China, albeit the location effect was not statistically significant. Prior education level had a clear and consistent effect on the SRL ability in both countries: the distance learners from junior colleges had better planning, regulating and evaluating abilities than those who came from senior high schools. These results have been discussed in various contexts of distance/online education as well as in relation to different culture between China and Korea. The results will also have implications for designing distance and online learning generally.

• The Mathematical Education
• /
• v.60 no.4
• /
• pp.529-542
• /
• 2021

The purpose of this research is to compare the mathematical beliefs that directly or indirectly affect the mathematics learning of Korean languge learners with those of non-Korean languge learners and identify the characteristics. To this end, an analytical comparative research was conducted through a questionnaire survey on perceptions of mathematics learning for 6th grade students of elementary school with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds in the same mathematics classroom. As a result of the analysis, Korean languge learners and non-Korean languge learners gave different meanings to learning mathematics, and they recognized various meanings of success in mathematics. In addition, the math learning ability of non-Korean learners was evaluated higher than that of Korean learners. Based on their positive beliefs, they decided how to resolve conflict situations with different problem-solving results. It will be necessary to prepare a teaching/learning plan that can fully implement multicultural mathematics education in the mathematics classroom where Korean language learners with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds belong. The results of this research can contribute to raising awareness of the need for follow-up researches to find ways to reduce the learning gap between Korean languge learners and non-Korean languge learners. It is expected that this research will contribute to understanding the perceptive characteristics of Korean language learners about learning mathematics and to prepare a plan to utilize them in mathematics lessons.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 1996.10a
• /
• pp.37-42
• /
• 1996

This study aims to see some prosodic features of English spoken by Japanese learners of English. It focuses on speech rates, pauses, and intonation when the learners read an English passage. Three Japanese learners of English, who are all male university students, were asked to read the speech material, an English passage of 110 word length, at their normal reading speed. Then a native speaker of English, a male American English teacher. was asked to read the same passage. The Japanese speakers were also asked to read a Japanese passage of 286 letters (Japanese Kana) to compare the reading of English with that of japanese. Their speech was analyzed on a computerized system (KAY Computerized Speech Lab). Wave forms, spectrograms, and F0 contours were shown on the screen to measure the duration of pauses, phrases and sentences and to observe intonation contours. One finding of the experiment was that the movement of the low speakers' speech rates showed a similar tendency in their reading of the English passage. Reading of the Japanese passage by the three learners also had a similar tendency in the movement of speech rates. Another finding was that the frequency of pauses in the learners speech was greater than that in the speech of the native speaker, but that the ration of the total pause length to the whole utterance length was about tile same in both the learners' and the native speaker's speech. A similar tendency was observed about the learners' reading of the Japanese passage except that they used shorter pauses in the mid-sentence position. As to intonation contours, we found that the learners used a narrower pitch range than the native speaker in their reading of the English passage while they used a wider pitch range as they read the Japanese passage. It was found that the learners tended to use falling intonation before pauses whereas the native speaker used different intonation patterns. These findings are applicable to the teaching of English pronunciation at the passage level in the sense that they can show the learners. Japanese here, what their problems are and how they could be solved.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.17-24
• /
• 2021

In this study, listening errors by Korean EFL learners are comprehensively analyzed from self-paced passage dictation tasks. Fifty-five Korean EFL learners participated in the study. Listeners were asked to write down dictation passages as accurately as possible, while listening to the audio as much as they needed. The results show that (i) low-proficiency learners tend to misperceive longer phrases than high-proficiency learners, (ii) function words are more often omitted or misheard than content words, and (iii) low-proficiency learners have more difficulties with content words than high-proficiency learners do. Most frequent suffix errors were omissions of past or plural suffixes. Among the function words, the most frequent errors were found with auxiliary contractions, infinitive marker to, and articles, mostly in the environment of linking and elision. It is also shown that C-V linking, C-C linking, and elision are the primary sources for the most frequent errors. C-V linking led to errors in correctly locating the word boundary, while C-C linking and elision resulted in omission. These errors show that Korean EFL listeners have difficulties in detecting fine-grained phonetic details to the extent that native speakers can do.