This addresses the error types of English voiceless fricatives spoken by Korean elementary students. For this purpose, 31 words which include voiceless fricatives were collected from the elementary school textbook based on the basic word list i...
This addresses the error types of English voiceless fricatives spoken by Korean elementary students. For this purpose, 31 words which include voiceless fricatives were collected from the elementary school textbook based on the basic word list issued by the Ministry of Education Science and Technology in 2011. They were classified in accordance with the position of fricatives: onset and coda. Six students participated in this experiment with no special pronunciation training in advance. They were 5th and 6th graders aged 12~13.
The students read the words right before recording to make sure that they could read the words. Their productions were recorded and transcribed. The transcribed data were divided into correct and incorrect productions. The incorrect productions were subclassified in accordance with the error types such as replacement and insertion.
From this experiment, the following results were drawn. The overall error rate of the Korean elementary students' productions of the English voiceless fricatives was not very high and accounted for 26.8%. Considering the error types, almost all of the students substituted target fricatives with other sounds except for just one, insertion.
There was a big positional difference. That is, the subjects performed worse in the onset positions showing 62.7% of error rate than in the coda position (37.3%). Investigating each phoneme, Korean students showed a high error rate for the inter-dental and labio-dental fricatives (/ɵ/: 59.5%, /f/: 49.3%), in contrast with a very low error rate for the alveolar and palato-alveolar fricatives (/s/: 6.9%, /ʃ/: 3.5%). This suggests that the fricatives which are not in the inventory of the Korean fricatives are harder for Korean students to acquire than those which exist in Korean as phonemes or their variants.
This study shows that it is not quite easy for Korean elementary students to acquire English voiceless fricatives. Thus, it is necessary that Korean elementary students need to be provided with more systematic pronunciation training. The effective pronunciation teaching could help to improve the ability of understanding the target language and to increase their communicative ability with more acceptable pronunciation in real situations.
，韩语论文网站，韩语毕业论文 |
