Linguistic Phonetics and Korean Language Teaching - A Phonetic Approach to Teaching Standard Pronunciation -

한국어 교육 향상을 위한 언어학적 기초 연구

The teaching of pronunciation is one of the areas in which linguistic phonetics can play an extremely useful role. This paper is concerned with the application of the results of my phonetic research to the actual teaching of Korean standard pronunciation with special reference to speech rhythm. It has been found that Korean words and utterances of various lengths are pronounced in standard Korean with one of the four main rhythmic patterns, each containing a strong stress. Unless we get the rhythmic patterns right in pronouncing Korean words and utterances, therefore, the resulting pronounciation is bound to sound dialectal or incorrect and in many instances even unintelligible to listeners. Hence the undeniable need to devise a useful technique to teach the Korean speech rhythm in a systematic way. In this paper each of the four main rhythmic patterns is presented and elaborated with sample examples taken from the living Korean. It is hoped that these examples of words and utterances can be used at the same time as useful pronunciation drill material not only for Koreans with dialectal background but also for foreign learners of Korean.