Back to Main Page.

Originally submitted in the course

LING 901: Phonetics and Phonology,

Master of Applied Linguistics,

Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

June 1996.

E-mail: m487396@Rocketmail.com

In 1996, the Korean Ministry of Education introduced the requirement that all freshman students be required to take one year of basic English Language training. This training is to have a written and a spoken component and the spoken component is to be made up of two class-hours of instruction each week during the two 16 week terms. Once holidays, English department exams, non-English department exams, and university social and sports functions have been subtracted, this comes to about ten weeks of classes, with about an hour and forty minutes of class time per week. 

In our department, which was set up for the first time in February this year, there are currently sixteen instructors of English conversation. Each instructor teaches up to eight classes of forty freshman students. I estimate the total number of students in the program to be about four-thousand. The students are drawn from a variety of mostly technical majors like Engineering, Computer-Science, and Physics. Students majoring in English Language, Literature and Linguistics are taught in separate departments.

All students in Korea receive training in English grammar and vocabulary from middle-school (Junior-High) onwards. This training is profoundly non-communicative. There is a heavy emphasis on intensive rote-memorization of vocabulary and unanalyzed phrases, and on passive, multiple choice, taped, listening examinations. Since it is currently illegal for high school students to study at private language schools (and most would not have time anyway), unless they have had the opportunity to travel overseas, their chances of having studied with a native speaker of English before coming to university are virtually nil.

All instructors are native speakers of English who have had at least some teaching experience in Korea or in their home countries. To my knowledge, only four instructors have ever taken a course in English phonetics and phonology. About half the instructors have taken a course in language teaching methodology at some time. This includes one or two instructors who took their courses in French.

In the past, examinations have taken the form of taped, multiple choice or short answer listening tests. These are in the process of being phased out and replaced by some form of spoken conversation task. The number of students involved makes it impractical to hold individual student interviews, so we are experimenting with a dialogue based task prepared by pairs of students.

Korean speakers of English run into several problems in their efforts to acquire the sound system of English. I will divide these into problems with individual speech sounds due to transference from the first language, problems with obtrusive vowel insertion due to differences in syllable formation between Korean and English, problems with lexical stress due to the syllable-timed nature of Korean, and problems in the use of weak forms and in the placement of sentence-stress due to unfamiliarity with the stress-timed nature of English. I will also discuss problems due to prevailing misconceptions about the nature of spoken language learning.

Several English consonant sounds do not exist in the Korean speech sound system. These include the fricatives /f/, /v/, / q / and / ¶ /. These sounds are produced as /p/, /b/, /t/ and /d/ respectively, and the /p/ and /f/ and /b/ and /v/ sounds in particular are very often confused. Korean does not make a distinction between voiced and unvoiced plosives. Thus, several English consonants are not distinguished. These include /p/ and /b/, /t/ and /d/, /k/ and /g/. The overlap is especially noticeable in word initial position and one will often find Korean words written in English with more than one spelling. For example, the cities of Pusan and Taejon are often written as Busan and Daejon. Finally, Korean speakers make no distinction between /r/ and /l/. The equivalent Korean consonant is alveolar and is somewhere between the two: The name of (former president) Roh Tae-Woo is in fact pronounced as Noh Dae-Woo.

There are differences in the structure of syllables between Korean and English. In Korean, consonants are not released unless they are followed by a vowel in the same syllable, and word final consonants are never released (Baxter, p.120). This causes the insertion of a vowel at the end of every English word which ends with a consonant. For example, "Mark" becomes /maku/ and "college" becomes / kaleji /. This is a strong characteristic of the speech of beginning learners of English in Korea.

Korean is a syllable timed language and Korean learners of English are unused to the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in English words. Unlike native speakers of English, they have no intuitive grasp of lexical stress patterns. They must learn each new vocabulary item with its pattern of stress attached. This area seems to be neglected in their high school English training. Because they are only used to seeing words on paper, they are reluctant to reduce unstressed vowels to schwa.

Korean is a syllable rather than stress timed language. Korean learners of English have little or no experience in using English in communicative situations, where emphasizing and de-emphasizing words takes on a meaning in context. Also, Korean has a very different syntactic structure to English. Because of these factors, Korean learners of English tend to pronounce each word in a sentence with equal emphasis. They have difficulty producing and perceiving weak forms in English, and they have little intuitive grasp of where to speed up, slow down, add stress or de-emphasize words in their sentences for communicative effect.

Lastly, there are problems arising from prevailing notions about the nature of language and what is involved in learning a language. Beginning learners of English in Korea are intensely self-conscious about their pronunciation. They are caught between the horns of a dilemma. They do not want to be heard to use pronunciation which is obviously at variance with that of native speakers, and they are embarrassed when native speakers cannot understand their speech. On the other hand, they do not wish to be heard using obviously "foreign" pronunciation in front of their Korean peers. Also, the only areas of pronunciation which they have been exposed to are those dealing with individual speech sounds. They are unfamiliar with, and unaware of the importance of, super-segmental aspects of pronunciation such as lexical stress patterns, weak forms, and communicative stress and intonation within sentences. Also, because memorization of unanalyzed forms is the learning strategy practiced in high school, they are also unfamiliar with coping strategies such as asking for repetition, asking for clarification, circumlocution, or inferring meaning from context. They are reluctant to use such strategies because their use shows that they have not memorized the word or phrase which is causing the problem.

Paradoxically, it is not problems with individual speech sounds which causes the greatest problems with comprehension and comprehensibility, yet these are the areas which Korean learners of English have been trained to focus on. This tendency is reinforced by the widespread use in Korea of instructors who are native speakers of English, but who have little or no experience or training in the teaching of English to foreign learners. Not yet really knowing what they should be doing in the classroom, such teachers very often latch on to the most salient aspect of their student's speech and proceed to teach that. The result is endless rounds of minimal-pair practice justified along the lines of "well if I can't understand what they're saying then I can't teach them." Being unfamiliar with the concept of context, these instructors will resort to such meaningless and humiliating exercises as having students mark which word of a minimal pair was said, when the word is said in isolation and the instructor has covered his or her mouth to that student's cannot even see the instructors lips.

Now that I have outlined the problems which our students have in learning English pronunciation, and the context in which our teachers address these problems, I can make proposals for improving the teaching of pronunciation in our program. I will begin by proposing a general approach, and then give some specific proposals for dealing with the various problem areas.

Obviously, the teaching of pronunciation (and anything else!) in our program is severely constrained by lack of class time and large class sizes. Our mandate is to improve our students ability to communicate in English. With only 140 minutes of class time per week we are forced to pack the maximum amount of meaningful communicative value into each classroom activity. I propose that we focus on those areas of pronunciation that will most facilitate our students meaningful communicative ability in the shortest amount of time. It would no doubt be beneficial for our students to receive the intensive and time-consuming training necessary to add missing phonemes and released consonant syllable codas to their repertoire. However, given the time and number constraints on our program, and given that communicative information lost due to these problems can usually be recovered from context, I propose that our time would be better spent on other areas. Also, other areas of pronunciation such as communicative problem solving strategies, use of stress and intonation for communicative effect, use of weak forms and variation of speech rhythm to reflect the stress timing of English, and awareness of lexical stress patterns, can more easily be integrated and combined with other communicative activities. I propose that pronunciation training be combined and integrated with other communicative grammar, vocabulary, listening, and situational/ functional exercises wherever possible. Integrated exercises are more likely to be communicatively meaningful, and are necessary due to constraints on our classroom time. I do note however that teachers (myself included) often use the excuse of "I'll teach it in the context of the lesson" to accidentally forget to teach pronunciation at all, so some isolated focus on pronunciation may be beneficial.

I propose that communicative problem solving strategies are the first thing we should teach to help our students compensate for their pronunciation problems. There is not much we can do about their intrusive vowel insertion, individual speech sound problems, or problems with lexical stress during the first week of class, but we can empower them to solve pronunciation problems in conversation from the beginning. Strategies include asking for repetition and clarification, asking or giving a synonym, asking for or giving a spelling, asking how to say an unfamiliar word, or quite simply writing the word that is causing the problem. Such strategies, that we as native speakers take for granted, are completely absent from the students prior training in English, and in my experience they need to be trained and coached before they can use them.

I propose that, at every available opportunity, our students be made aware of the communicative value of intonation and placement of emphatic and contrastive stress within sentences. Every dialogue, every role-play, every lexical phrase that is taught is an opportunity to do this, and each should be introduced with both demonstration and practice of how its intonation contour contributes to its meaning and communicative function within the context. They should be encouraged to experiment with phrases to see how the meaning changes with different patterns of intonation and emphasis.

I propose that students are much more likely to adopt the use of weak forms and stress-timed speech rhythm when they are aware of the communicative value of stressing or not stressing pronouns, prepositions and auxiliaries for a particular communicative purpose. Once again, almost every communicative exercise is an opportunity to teach this. All Korean college students are familiar with the phonetic alphabet and standard methods for marking intonation contours, so phrases can be written on the board and discussed with a common notation. Many students are fascinated by phrases like "What'a'ye'gonnaDO?" as if the use of weak forms is some kind of trick or code that was kept secret from them in high school. Some teachers have found chanting phrases with a regular rhythm to be effective in getting students to adopt stress-timing, but I prefer to focus attention on the communicative weight that is carried by the words that are stressed within a given phrase.

I propose that while our students would dearly like a set of simple, fool-proof rules for lexical stress placement, we obviously cannot teach the awkward generative rules given in phonology textbooks. It is better to build their intuitive grasp of these patterns with clear examples and to re-assure them that native speakers often have trouble with unfamiliar words also. (How do you say Shaquil, or diectic?) We can do this by having them visually mark the stress patterns of new vocabulary and showing how unstressed vowels are reduced. Students who have had the vast majority of their exposure to English in written form are reluctant to reduce unstressed vowels since it clashes with their written mental representation of the word. Once variation between stressed and unstressed syllables has been introduced, and in particular, once unstressed vowels have begun to be reduced or even deleted, the obtrusive insertion of vowels within consonant clusters and at the end of words will subside. I have observed that advanced learners in Korea generally have much less problem with either lexical stress or vowel insertion.

This leaves the teaching of individual speech sounds. As pointed out, communication problems arising from the confusion of /r/ and /l/ and so forth are solvable by using information in the context such as stress and intonation contours, and by using basic problem solving strategies. My students know very well that I did not visit Lome and Rondon on my vacation, and if they are confused, they can ask. The /p/ an /f/ confusion is admittedly harder to disentangle in speech, but I would argue that it is much less of a problem than deciphering the many weak forms in a common phrase like "Wad'a'ya'gonnaDO?". Certainly some time could be spent raising students awareness of sounds and contrasts that are missing in their first language, perhaps with the careful and contextualized contrast of minimal pairs. That way those students who are motivated to acquire these sounds and contrasts can practice them on their own.

Because of the non-communicative nature of our students' previous training in English, with its emphasis on individual speech sounds, and because of the time constraints on our classes, I propose that we encourage our students to shift their attention from the segmental to the super-segmental aspects of pronunciation. I propose that we focus our attention on the meanings carried by the different areas of English pronunciation within the context of communication, and that this focus be integrated as much as possible with our other communicative learning activities.

Back to Main Page.