The purpose of this study is to compare and analyze the perceptions and attitudes of adult native speakers of Korean and Chinese toward the pronunciation of World Englishes. Fifty-two Korean and 63 Chinese speakers listened to six variations of World Englishes and then completed a questionnaire outlining their perceptions and attitudes toward the different pronunciations. The survey results revealed that Korean adult English learners showed less favorable attitudes toward different pronunciations of World Englishes than Chinese adult language learners did. Korean adult learners preferred American English, but Chinese adult learners preferred Canadian English. Among the three individual variables measured, the first language showed the greatest influence in their responses. The findings of this study imply that, in the context of English education in Korea, it is necessary to raise the awareness of both teachers and learners to the acceptability of World Englishes through exposure to a wide variety of English pronunciations.

This study compares AI PengTalk’s assessments of Korean children’s pronunciation with the assessments of Korean teachers. Sixty Korean sixth-graders participated as assessees, and four Korean elementary teachers participated as assessors. Both PengTalk and the teachers rated the children’s production of 10 English sentences on a five-point scale. They focused on segmentals, stress-rhythm, intonation, and speech rate. The findings were as follows: Firstly, PengTalk evaluated the children’s pronunciation in the four elements significantly lower than the teachers across all English proficiency levels. Secondly, teachers’ ratings of the students aligned more closely with their pre-evaluated English proficiency levels than the AI PengTalk’s assessments. The teachers rated students at the upper level significantly higher than those at the intermediate level, who were, in turn, assessed significantly higher than those at the lower level in all four elements. Furthermore, AI PengTalk and the teachers differed in the mean order of the four elements, particularly in segmentals. Based on the results of this study, suggestions were made for the development and implementation of AI-based English programs.

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.

벼리】이 연구의 목적은 영어권 학습자의 비음동화 발음 실태를 살 펴보고 오류 분석을 통한 비음동화 발음 교육 방안을 마련하는데 있 다. 비음동화 환경이 포함된 문장을 영어권 학습자에게 제시하고 발 화를 녹음하여 분석하였다. 녹음된 자료를 바탕으로 환경별 비음동화 발음 오류를 분석하였다. 오류 분석 결과를 바탕으로 통합형 한국어 비음동화 교육방안을 마련하였다.

The purposes of this study are to examine the effects of the speech-analysis software on Korean college students' pronunciation improvement, and to find out ways to enhance the efficiency of computer-based visual feedback in the teaching of English pronunciation. The participants of the study are 89 English-major college students who are required and expected to have native-like pronunciation. A total of 178 recorded pronunciation data of pre-and post-tests were analyzed in terms of consonants, tense/lax vowels, consonant clusters, and phonological changes. The major findings of the study are as follows: First, the use of speech-analysis software was effective in improving the students' pronunciation. Second, the use of speech-analysis software was more effective at the discourse-level than at the word-in-isolation or sentence levels. In addition, it was more effective to students with low level pronunciation proficiency than those with high level proficiency. Third, the use of speech-analysis software was the most effective in training word-initial [h]-deletion of function words at the sentence level. Fourth, the participants responded that the visual feedback of speech-analysis program was useful in self-monitoring and self-correcting their pronunciation errors. Based on these findings, some pedagogical suggestions are made with respect to the didactic use of speech-analysis software in the teaching of English pronunciation.

Since the introduction of the 6th National Curriculum, English pronunciation teaching in Korea has geared toward fluency, less focusing on accuracy. Since then the two technical terms, accuracy and fluency, have been widely used in the EFL literature in Korea, but in a rather confusing way. This paper is an endeavor to clarify these two concepts in terms of the viewpoints of Phonetics and English Education. From the phonetic standpoint, I argued that accuracy is more closely related to 'clear speech,' whereas fluency is applicable to either 'clear speech' or 'casual speech'. I also suggested two methods for the evaluation of English speaking fluency: one is the evaluation of weak form pronunciation: the other, sentence stresses. From a viewpoint of English Education, I reviewed some relevant literature and found that (1) accuracy and fluency are related to language usage and language use, respectively; (2) accuracy and fluency have been used as terms applicable to all four language skills in language learning, rather than speaking skill only: (3) a definition of fluency needs to be modified for its flexible use in ESL/EFL classroom setting; (4) a number of recent textbooks on pronunciation teaching include lots of useful fluency enhancing practices. As a conclusion, I summed up afore-mentioned discussions and presented some suggestions for the National Curriculum in the future.

This paper discusses what the basic principle of Korean consonantal assimilation and tensification is and how to teach the two processes to learners. Since some of the Korean phonological changes including these two processes are complicated and cannot easily be seen in other languages, students may face difficulty in learning such processes. It has been claimed that these processes are due to the "principle of economy" in pronunciation. That is, certain consonant clusters or consonantal sequences that are difficult to produce undergo changes in a way to make them easy to pronounce. In this paper I argue against such a claim by adopting the principle of English, which has two different types of consonant clusters, namely "word-initial and word-final clusters". The phonotactic constraints of the word-final clusters in this language, which are opposite to the case of word-initial clusters, have the ascending structure in the consonantal strength between the two consonants. We see that the two consonants in sequence in Korean have almost the same structure. Unlike English, these constraints must be obeyed whether words are simple or complex in Korean. The two consonants that are not kept up to these constraints by the morphological process undergo phonological process. This is the principle of consonantal assimilation and tensification in Korean, and thus, teachers (and also possibly learners) of Korean should recognize the principle to understand the processes correctly.

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.

Hyunsong Chung. 2017. A Diagnostic Review of English Pronunciation Teaching Based on the Analysis of the 2015 Revised English Curriculum and English Textbooks. Studies in Modern Grammar 96, 191-212. In this paper, we discuss the goal of English pronunciation teaching in Korea and how to elaborate the elements of English pronunciation teaching in the national curriculum based on the analysis of the 2015 revised English language curriculum and English textbooks. We suggest that the elements of English pronunciation teaching should be explicitly and properly specified for all the levels in the curriculum including primary and secondary levels. The activities in the classroom should combine task-based controlled practices in pronunciation with communicative activities. Phonetic symbols in the textbooks should pursue IPA conventions and be consistent. It is necessary to continue the discussions and conduct researches on pronunciation teaching in the national curriculum so that the results can be positively reflected in the future revision of the English curriculum.