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.

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.

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.

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.