경남 방언 영어학습자들의 영어 고모음 인지 연구

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the perception (mapping) of English high vowels /i, I, u, U/ of Korean EFL learners. The experiment subjects were 35 male middle school students who were born and have lived in South Kyungsang Korea. English high vowels are easy to be confused by Korean English learners thus these vowels were chosen as English target vowels for the current perception study. This study investigated how the subjects perceive these English high vowels and match them to what Korean vowels by carrying out the perception experiment. In addition, the current study implemented the test to look into the Korean subjects' perception concerning the degree of similarity between Korean and English high vowels which they listened to. The results are as follows. First, the English high front tense vowel /i/ is perceived as Korean vowel /이/ in 97.1% which is the highest mapping rate. The English high back lax vowel /U/ is perceived as Korean vowel /우/ in 42.5% which is the lowest mapping rate of this experiment. Second, in the case of the degree of similarity between English and Korean vowels, most South Kyungsang Korean subjects marked number 3 or 4 out of 1 (same as Korean) to 7 (totally different from Korean) Likert Scale. Thus, the subjects seemed to recognize only some degree of similarity between two different vowel systems. This study shows that South Kyungsang Korean middle school English learners have perceived and corresponded English high tense vowels better than English high lax vowels. That is, Korean vowel system does not distinguish tenseness and laxness distinctively, but the South Kyungsang Korean subjects mostly perceived English high tense vowels as Korean high tense vowels (97.1%) and they think the English vowels are somewhat similar to Korean vowels (3∼4 out of 7) even though they do not think Korean and English vowels are exactly the same. Therefore, South Kyungsang Korean English learners seem to perceive and match the English high tense vowels more easily than the lax vowels in the case of perception of English vowels and their mapping to Korean vowel system. This implies that South Kyungsang Korean EFL learners need to understand more accurately the vowel system of a target language when they learn the language. From the results of the present study, it does not seem to need a separate pronunciation education system for South Kyungsang Korean English learners. However, South Kyungsang Korean English learners need to be educated the difference between their native language (L1) and a second language (L2). Especially, it seems that South Kyungsang Korean English learners need a focused and intensive education for the acquisition of English lax vowels.