Korean Students' Repetition of English Sentences Under Noise and Speed Conditions

소음과 속도를 변화시킨 영어 문장 따라하기에 대한 연구

Recently, many scholars have emphasized the importance of English listening ability for smoother communication. Most audio materials, however, were recorded in a quiet sound-proof booth. Therefore, students who have spent so much time listening to the ideal audio materials are expected to have difficulty communicating with native speakers in the real life. In this study, we examined how well thirty three Korean university students and five native speakers will repeat the recorded English sentences under noise and speed conditions. The subjects' production was scored by listening to each recorded sentence and counting the number of words correctly produced and determined the percent ratios of correctly produced words to the total words in each sentence. Results showed that the student group correctly repeated around 65% of all the words in each sentence while the native speakers demonstrated almost perfect match. It seemed that the students had difficulty perceiving and repeating function words in various conditions. Also, high-proficiency student group outperformed the low-proficiency student group particularly in their repetition of function words. In addition, the student subjects' accuracy of repetition remarkably dropped when the normal sentences were both sped up and mixed with noise. Finally, it was observed that the Korean students' percent correct ratio fell down as the stimulus sentence became longer.