• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.1-23
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• 2004

This article reports a bi-directional interlanguage study designed to investigate the initial state of L2 acquisition with regard to English and Korean wh-questions. Based on the UG system in line with the minimalist theory, it was hypothesized that the L2 initial state is characterized by the most economical form of syntax in which no overt wh-movement to Spec-CP is assumed. Results of the early interlanguage study showed that 1) L1 Korean learners of L2 English predominantly produced wh-questions with the fronted wh-word, but without productive wh-movement to the Spec-CP position; and 2) L1 English learners of L2 Korean overwhelmingly produced wh-questions with the wh-word remaining in-situ. These results were interpreted as supporting the minimalist account of the L2 initial grammar in that no overt syntactic wh-movement were adopted in early interlanguages of both English and Korean regardless of the learner's L1.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.37-44
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• 2023

This study investigates perceptual confusions of English fricatives among 121 Korean elementary school English as a foreign language (EFL) learners with shorter periods of learning English. The objective is to examine how they perceive English fricative consonants and to provide educational guidelines. Two sets of English fricative identification tasks-voiceless fricatives and voiced fricatives-were administered to participants in a High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) setting. Their phonemic awareness of the fricatives was visualized in perceptual confusion maps via multidimensional scaling analysis. The findings are explored in terms of the impacts of Korean EFL learners' L1 linguistic aspects and a comparison with L1 learners. Learners' phonemic awareness patterns are then compared with their relative importance in speech intelligibility based on a functional load hierarchy. The results indicated that Korean elementary EFL learners recognized English fricatives in a manner largely akin to L1 learners, suggesting their ongoing acquisition progress. Additionally, the findings demonstrated that the young EFL learners possess sufficient phonemic awareness for most high functional load segments but encounter some difficulties with one high and one low functional pair. The findings of this study offer suggestions for diagnosing language learners' phonemic awareness abilities, thereby aiding in the development of practical guidelines for language instructional design and helping educators make informed decisions regarding teaching priority in L2 classes.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.115-121
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• 2011

This paper examines how L2 speech production varies according to learner's L2 proficiency level. L2 speech production variations are analyzed by quantitative measures at word and phone levels using Korean learners' English corpus. Word-level variations are analyzed using correctness to explain how speech realizations are different from the canonical forms, while accuracy is used for analysis at phone level to reflect phone insertions and deletions together with substitutions. The results show that speech production of learners with different L2 proficiency levels are considerably different in terms of performance and individual realizations at word and phone levels. These results confirm that speech production of non-native speakers varies according to their L2 proficiency levels, even though they share the same L1 background. Furthermore, they will contribute to improve non-native speech recognition performance of ASR-based English language educational system for Korean learners of English.

• Language Facts and Perspectives
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• v.44
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• pp.357-397
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• 2018

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the phonemic errors in Korean learner's spoken corpus. Through this, we tried to investigate the common errors and the errors in certain languages. The results of the analysis were as follows. First, Errors that distinguish three phonemes(plain sound, tense sound, aspiration sound) were high in all languages. In the middle phonemes, the most common errors in pronouncing 'ㅓ' in all languages. Second, the errors of each language are different. Comparing the ratios by position, Chinese characters had the most common errors with 50% in final phoneme, and the Japanese language showed equal errors in initial, middle, and end. In English, initial phoneme errors accounted for 58%. Vietnamese Learners showed intensive errors in the initial and final phoneme. Third, in addition to the phoneme errors, we also examined the allophone errors and foreign language pronunciation errors. The allophone errors are mainly concentrated in 'ㄹ', ​​and the pronunciation of the foreign language is mainly used in the source language or the native language of the learners. This paper analyzes the phoneme errors in the Learner's spoken language through the spoken corpus data with representative and annotation consistency. Through this study, we could compare the difference of phoneme errors of Main Korean learners.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.273-290
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• 2011

This paper presents a case study involving one Korean primary school student and people around him in order to explore the reading process in English of a young Korean EFL learner and to investigate the social context in which his reading takes place. Six participants were included in the study (one primary school student and five adult participants). The student participant was asked to read a text in English and translate what he read into Korean and the teacher participants were asked to listen to the student's reading. Semi-structured interview was used to collect data from the student as well as five adult participants (his private tutor, his parent, his state school teacher, and two other state school teachers). The analysis reveals four characteristics of the way a young EFL learner approaches reading: word-by-word reading, disconnected word recognition, selective use of cues, and lack of awareness of difficulties. The four characteristics of Kilsu's reading suggest that reading can become a wild guessing game for young foreign learners, if they give selective attention to unimportant cues while reading. The pedagogical implications of this study are also discussed to help teachers designing reading lessons for young learners.

• Annual Conference of KIPS
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.629-632
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• 2006

본 논문에서는 영어 학습을 도와주고 영한 기계번역 시스템의 평가를 통해 기계번역 시스템의 성능 개선을 위한 도구인 HS-eLearner를 설계, 구현하였다. HS-eLearner는 영어 문장의 번역 뿐만 아니라 입력 문장의 구조, 문장에 사용된 단어의 의미를 제공하여 사용자의 효과적인 영어 학습을 보조하는 기능을 가진다. 또한 사용자가 번역된 문장을 평가하여 사용자에 의한 객관적인 번역 시스템에 대한 평가를 기대할 수 있으며 평가 결과를 개발자에게 제공함으로써 번역 시스템의 성능 개선에 사용될 수 있다. 즉 사용자와 개발자간의 커뮤니케이션을 제공함으로써 사용자의 요구를 수용할 수 있는 시스템으로의 개선을 용이하게 한다.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1057-1085
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• 2009

This paper addresses the question of why prepositions are particularly difficult forEFL learners. The first reason for such difficulty lies in the distinction between seemingly equivalent prepositions such as to and with, as in compared to and compared with. Most monolingual learners' dictionaries regard these two phrases as virtually synonymous. Yet, the results of the corpus analysis conducted in this study indicate that there are differences between the two. A second reason why EFL learners have problems with prepositions is that there are often variations in the inputdata. For example, although from generally follows different, in American English different than is also used. On the other hand, in British English, different to is the second most commonly used construction. This type of regional variation, confirmed in the corpus findings of the present paper, causes confusion in students of English. A learner who is not accustomed to British English may be puzzled by the expression different to. Finally, L1 negative transfer is responsible for the incorrect use of expressions such as discuss about. An error of this sort is the result of interference from the learner's mother tongue. The English verb discuss is not subcategorized for a preposition, whereas the equivalent Korean verb, for example, requires a noun phrase combined with the postposition.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.03a
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• pp.103-104
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• 2000

As the role and status of English as an international language(EIL) have been widely discussed, studies need to be done to find out new issues and concerns related to teaching EIL In Korea. This presentation will review the changes in teaching English in Korea, teaching pronunciation, in particular, focusing on its goal and major instructional approaches. Suggestions will be made on developing a learner-centered communicative model for teaching English pronunciation and on training both Korean and foreign teachers of English to teach English pronunciation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.101-107
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• 2010

This study investigates the difference in the evaluation of English pronunciation quality between native speakers of English and Korean learners of English. This study employs a novel method of independently evaluating the prosody and segmentals of English sentences. A set of stimuli were made by swapping the prosody and the segmentals of English sentences read by a native speaker of American English and a Korean learner of English. Evaluations of the difference level of stimuli pairs and the goodness of the pronunciation quality showed that both native speakers of English and Korean learners of English give priority to the segmentals but native speakers of English were more sensitive to the difference in prosody in the evaluation of English pronunciation.

• Language Facts and Perspectives
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• v.48
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• pp.195-227
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• 2019

Building upon the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, the present study classifies the texts written by Korean EFL learners and English native speakers and thereby demonstrates how the two types of texts differ from each other. To this end, the current work makes use of the Yonsei English Learner Corpus (YELC) and Gacheon Learner Corpus (GLC) as the L2 data, and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as the L1 data. Utilizing the sentence classification methods, the current work implements a system to differentiate the two types of texts, the accuracy of which is about 94%. This indicates that the deep leaning-based system is capable of identifying the well-formedness and felicities of the texts written by Korean EFL learners. Nonetheless, the system-based judgments do not overlap with human judgments largely because the deep learning model exclusively focuses on sequence of words. The present study provides a further analysis to see how the two types of judgments differ with respect to grammatical errors (e.g., word order, voice, etc.) and felicity errors (e.g., semantic prosody, the position of adverbs, etc.).