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 study examined effects of pronunciation training using automatic speech recognition technology on common pronunciation errors of Korean English learners. Participants were divided into two groups. One group was given instruction and training about the use of automatic speech recognition for pronunciation practice. The other group was not given such instruction or training as a control group. A pre- and post-test experimental design was used. The treatment period was four weeks. Participants who were taught about using automatic speech recognition for pronunciation practice showed small but significant improvements in pronunciation accuracy than those who did not. In addition, automatic speech recognition was found to assist in the diagnostic evaluation of common pronunciation errors, although it did not produce statistically significant improvements. Participants responded positively to the use of automatic speech recognition for pronunciation practice and testing, although there remain some concerns over technical aspects of the test.

This study investigated the extent to which explicit and implicit instruction improve L1-Arabic speakers’ articulation of English words whose cognates were acquired earlier in their L2 French. Sixty-eight secondary school students, explicit (n=35) and implicit (n=33), participated in a programme incorporating focus-on-pronunciation activities, comprising three 45-minute sessions. Their learning motivation was first rated using an adapted version of Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB). Their pronunciation improvement was assessed through an oral-reading task. Ten new words were included in the post-test to see if they would generalize the instructed knowledge analogically. Results indicated that both explicit and implicit instruction had a positive impact on the students’ pronunciation advancement. However, the explicit group outperformed the implicit group with both the targeted and untaught words. There was insignificant interaction effect between instructional method and students’ motivation level, with higher motivation uniformly enhancing the effect of instruction. Nevertheless, motivation played a more crucial role in the learnt knowledge transferability when instruction was of implicit.

With the wide availability of mobile devices, efforts to accommodate these technological devices have been made in pronunciation training. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of mobile apps in improving the perception and production of the English vowels, /o/ and /ɔ/, which are difficult to discriminate and produce for Korean learners of English. The participants were 24 college freshmen enrolled in a general English course. They shadowed the model pronunciation from the application and corrected their production after instant feedback from the automatic speech recognition application. Their perception was evaluated in the preand post-tests, and the production was visually examined on the formant chart. The training was held for 5 minutes each day, for a month. The results showed that the training made positive effects on improving students’ perception of the target vowels. There was also some progress in their production although the improvement was not as noticeable as in perception. A discrepancy in the production was discovered between male and female participants with the latter performing better.

Despite the validated EIL status, native English accents are commonly regarded as the most appropriate pronunciation-teaching norms, while nonnative accents are still considered inappropriate. This study attempts to explore Korean-speaking elementary teachers’ perceptions of native and nonnative English accents and find out the extent to which the teachers’ ratings of the accents show variance and correlations as regards likeability, familiarity, intelligibility, comprehensibility, and instructional model suitability. For these, 53 in-service Korean-speaking elementary teachers were asked to evaluate two native (American and British) and two nonnative (Filipino and Korean) English accents by the five variables. The results were as follows: 1) The AmE accent was rated most positively, while the FiE accent was least favorable in all the variables; 2) The KoE accent was evaluated to be more familiar, intelligible, and comprehensible than the BrE accent at a significant level. In contrast, the two accents exhibited an insignificant difference in likeability and suitability; 3) Significant correlations were obtained among the variables except for comparisons of likeability-intelligibility, likeability-comprehensibility, and familiarity-comprehensibility; 4) The instructional model suitability had a significant correlation with the four remaining variables. Based on these results, pedagogical implications and implications for teacher education were suggested, followed by this study’s limitations.

The goal of this study is to better understand the attitudes of students towards pronunciation in order to better evaluate the current university curriculum, as well as to make recommendations on how to improve the quality of education for students of English in South Korea. A total of fifty-five students were given both a questionnaire and a short interview which were utilized for the present study. The results demonstrate that the students agree pronunciation is important in English, and they wish to sound like a native speaker. It was also found that students are slightly worried about their own English accent, however they have not had much instruction on pronunciation. In addition, the participants of the study appeared to be more concerned with their accents, rather than comprehensibility or intelligibility. The most widely preferred accent by the participants was American accent followed by British accent. Although the participants acknowledged the importance of pronunciation or accent in English, they were reluctant to receive a class focusing on pronunciation. Based on the findings we suggest that there should be more collaboration between native and non-native speakers of English in Korea. Furthermore, we recommend that Korean students be exposed to more varieties of World Englishes through the integration of students from other countries into the classroom as well as conducted a class on World Englishes.

With the increased use of online learning in language education, the importance of videoconferencing lessons has recently received much attention in improving English speaking skills in Korea. This study examines the aspects of videoconferencing lesson that were helpful for improving students’ pronunciation. Six middle school students in Korea were assigned to two videoconferencing sessions with pre- and post-tests, and they had opportunities for interviews and selfreports after the two sessions. During the pre- and post-test, students pronounced words from a screen, distinguishing specifically between /r/ versus /l/ and /b/ versus /v/. In the interviews and self-reports, they described the factors in the videoconferencing lesson that were most helpful for their English learning. This study examined the appropriateness of videoconferencing tools and found that students’ self-assessment, more teacher feedback, and the flexibility of the technology were most helpful for improving Korean students’ English pronunciation.

The advancement in technology and availability of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) technology and the Internet made meaningful interaction possible in both on and offline environments, which is referred to as blended learning. Blended learning has recently begun to gain popularity in ELT, and appropriate models of blended learning need to be developed for EFL classrooms. However, there have not been many attempts to investigate its application and development of appropriate teaching and learning models of blended learning in the field of ELT, especially in relation to English language skills and subskills. Therefore, the purposes of this study are to investigate the students’ perspectives and effectiveness of blended learning in English pronunciation skills, and to explore gender differences in blended learning. The subjects of this study consist of 173 Korean university students, and quantitative data including questionnaire and pre-experiment were collected. The major findings of the study are as follows. First, students’ perspectives in blended learning, its components, and tools were very positive. Second, blended learning was found to be effective in the development of segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation skills. Third, there were few significant gender differences found regarding social aspects of online interaction. Implications and suggestions based on the findings and discussion are provided.

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 investigates the effect of pronunciation training on Korean adult learners’ perception and production of English vowels, /i/, /I/, /u/, and /Ω/. The study examines 1) the effect of pronunciation training on perception and production and 2) the maintenance of the effect over a one-month period. The subjects were 10 Korean graduate students who took a 4-week long English pronunciation training course. They were tested before and after pronunciation training and tested again one month after the training. In each test, both perception and production of the vowels were tested to see if the subjects were able to distinguish tense and lax vowels. In the perception part, subjects listened for words and checked the vowel (either tense or lax) sound they heard. For the production part, subjects read the selected words which contained the target vowels. The results show that pronunciation training has an effect, which supports the teachability of phonology in adulthood; however, the maintenance of the effect demonstrated a difference between perception and production, in which the effect was maintained in production but not in perception. Based on the results of the study, implications are discussed.