| 초록 |
Kang, Hijo. (2022). A study of English vowel pronunciation by Korean university students with articulatory and auditory training. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 30(4), 1-18. This study tested whether the pronunciation of English vowels could improve through the explicit instruction based on the articulatory and auditory characteristics of English vowels, even during the pandemic, when oral practice was restricted. 30 university students who took an English pronunciation course participated in the study as the experimental group and they were taught English vowels with articulatory and auditory training. The 21 students in the control group listened to target sentences recorded by a native English speaker in an English listening and speaking course. At the beginning and at the end of the semester, the participants in both groups recorded 18 English sentences, four of which ([i], [ɪ], [ɛ], and [æ]) were acoustically analyzed. As Korean learners of English are known to have difficulties distinguishing those front vowels ([i] vs. [ɪ] and [ɛ] vs. [æ]), the F1 differences in each of those vowel pairs were statistically analyzed. The results showed that only female students belonging to the experimental group marked a marginally meaningful improvement in the vowel pair of [ɛ] and [æ]. The author concludes that it is possible to partially enhance the English vowel pronunciations of Korean students through implicit listening and explicit articulatory training. Teaching methods to improve students pronunciation are suggested. |
