An accent reduction course for native speakers of American English learning Korean

초록

An accent reduction course was offered for native speakers of American English learning Korean to see if such a course would affect accent reduction as measured by several major phonological elements. Thirty-two adult American English native speakers at various levels of learning Korean as a second language took a five-week, one session per week course in Korean pronunciation during the 2010-2011 Academic Year at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. Each session looked at one of the following five major phonological elements in Korean: 1) consonants, 2) vowels, 3) phonological adjustments, 4) intonation, and 5) rhythm. The learners took a set of listening comprehension and speech production preand post-tests, and received mid-term feedback on their pre-test results. A control group of nine Korean native speakers took the same test, so that the test results could be compared. All test results were evaluated by another group of 56 native Korean speakers in terms of 1) accuracy for the given phonological elements, 2) fluency of the embedded utterances, and 3) the relative degree of a non-native accent apparent in each utterance before and after the instruction. The results show that 1) accent reduction was demonstrated, despite what has been written in the literature (e.g. Morales Pech and Izquierdo 2011 for pros and Ducate and Lomicka 2009 for cons), and 2) learners attain fluency, but retain accent on the comparable phonological elements in line with the previous literature by Moyer (2004).

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