The purpose of this study is to investigate how important Korean high school students perceive English word stress to be, how familiar they are with word stress, and how well they pronounce the reduced vowel /ə/. Sixty high school students in Seoul participated in a survey study that investigated their perception of the importance of word stress in English. They were then asked to mark the stress on each of the 44 words selected from the basic vocabulary list compiled by the Korean Ministry of Education and to pronounce each word twice. The results of the survey revealed that a vast majority of the students (50 out of 60, 80%) do not pay attention to the stress and pronunciation of words when they study new vocabulary and that they memorize only the spelling and meaning of new words. As a result, many of them could not identify the stressed syllables in many of the 44 words, even when they knew their meaning. As for their pronunciation of the reduced vowel /ə/, the students on average were able to pronounce /ə/ correctly in only 23 words, although they stressed the correct syllable in 28 words. All these results highlight the necessity of teaching Korean students explicitly the importance of word stress in English and the correct pronunciation of the reduced vowel /ə/ in order to help them improve their intelligibility.

The present study aims to investigate how well Google Voice Actions, an automatic speech recognition system, recognizes Korean young English learners’ pronunciation of English words. To achieve this aim, the current study arranged for 18 Korean elementary school students to pronounce 219 English words and recorded their pronunciation. Then, the intelligibility of their pronunciation was measured using Google Voice Actions. The current study analyzed the measured intelligibility of Google Voice Actions in terms of the phonemic difficulty and familiarity the learners have with the words. The phonemic difficulty of each word was labelled as Group 1 to 5, depending on the number of difficult phonemic elements it contains. The familiarity of each word was also measured through a questionnaire. The findings revealed that the accuracy in Google Voice Actions’ recognition was closely related to the students’the phonemic difficulties and familiarity of the words. Interestingly, the pronunciation of words in Group 5 gained the highest recognition scores and that of Group 1 the second highest scores. Those of Group 2, 3, and 4 recorded lower recognition scores than the two groups. These results suggest that the more phonemic information the pronunciation of a word provides, the more relevant clues would be available for Google Voice Actions. This increases the possibility of successful search from the speech database.