Many English loan words are used in Korea. However, most of them are written and pronounced quite differently from the original English sounds mainly because of the phonological differences between Korean and English. The purpose of this study is to a...
Many English loan words are used in Korea. However, most of them are written and pronounced quite differently from the original English sounds mainly because of the phonological differences between Korean and English. The purpose of this study is to analyze pronunciation errors of some English loan words by Korean students attending elementary, middle, and high schools and to examine their recognition of the English loan words. Sixteen elementary students, ten middle school students, and twenty high school students read the sentences contained English loan words. There were four sentences for elementary school students, seven sentences for middle school students, and ten sentences for high school students. These data were analyzed through the phonemes, grades, and the comparison between native speaker's pronunciation and the students'. For the specific comparison with English native speaker's pronunciation, the recording results of the students were analyzed by Praat, the computer software for the analysis of speech. Dynamic range of Praat was adjusted from thirty-five decibel to fifty decibel for better analysis. In order to understand the students' recognition of English loan words, a questionnaire was given to the students.
The main results are as follows:
(1) The students are good at pronouncing /l/ or /f/, but it's hard for them to pronounce /ʒ/ or /ϴ/ perfectly. They mostly use Korean phoneme /ㅈ/ or /ㅌ/, instead of using right sound of /ʒ/ or /ϴ/, because they've already been accustomed to Korean orthography of English loan words. These kinds of phonological replacement between Korean and English phonemes makes the students more confused. Among manners of the articulation, the most difficult manner to be pronounced by the students is Affricate, and Liquid is the easiest manner for them to articulate.
(2) The analysis by each grade shows that middle school students get the highest result. As the students enter high schools, their English loan words pronunciation gets worse. Especially, the mean value of the vocational high school students' is lower than that of the elementary school students. The analysis of pronunciation by groups shows that the students who get higher grade in their English exam at school pronounce English loan words better.
(3) In the questionnaire, most students haven't had no chance to learn the pronunciation of English loan words. It also shows that most of them have a fear of speaking in English. And the students want to learn pronunciation of English or English loan words in English class.
In conclusion, the students mostly make many errors when they articulate English loan words, by using Korean phonemes instead of using correct English phonemes. For this reason, loan word orthography has to be changed properly, but the problem is it's very hard to write the English phoneme in Korean perfectly. The students want to know, and learn how to pronounce English loan words properly. Therefore, English teacher should understand these situation, and teach the right sound of English loan words steadily. Especially, when the difficult English loan words included in Affricate or sounded with /ϴ/ or /ʒ/ appeared, English teachers should directly explain about the differences from Korean and practice with students. In order to avoid transcribing English loan words in Korean as it is, we need to try to translate English loan words into Korean and use the own Korean words which can explain the meanings of English loan words well.
，韩语论文题目，韩语毕业论文 |
