한국인 중학생 학습자의 영어 단어 강세 인지 및 발화 연구

Abstract

Korean students are firing up studying English, a world official language. Nevertheless, It's not easy for Korean students to pronounce English words correctly because of educational circumstances focusing on written English rather than spoken English. If some words are mispronounced, the meaning of the words could be changed with regard to the position of stress in English. In this study we attempt to analyze the actual condition of Korean middle school students about how to perceive and pronounce English word stress. This thesis deals with the condition of both the pitch and duration of stressed and unstressed syllable. In order to give objective and visible evidentiary material than subjective judgment, I use the waveform and formant of vowels. The subjects for experiment are third-year middle school students in Gwangju, south Jeolla province. The experiment was conducted as follows; First, I chose 36 words which students have already learned for production. The words are divided into disyllabic and trisyllabic words. Second, I also chose 50 words for perception. The words were collected from previous research data. In the production experiment, the students recorded the words in sentences. The students who finished recording filled up the questionnaire which is composed of 5 items. Next, the same students took a test of perception in which they heard a native speaker's production of words and marked the position of stress. Third, the production data were segmented and measured using Praat program. Specifically, the pitch and duration of stressed and unstressed vowels were measured and compared. The results follows as; First, Korean students tend to pronounce stressed vowels with higher pitch than unstressed ones. Second, they produced unstressed vowels longer than stressed one, which is contrary to those of native speakers. Third, the production and perception did not show any correlation.