NATIVE POTENTIAL LIKE L2 KOREAN PRONUNCIATION: EFFECTS OF HANGEUL PHONETIC INSTRUCTION

Abstract

For English monolinguals, Korean consonants tend to be difficult to pronounce due to the languages using different features to distinguish them. One prominent example of this is how English distinguishes consonants by vocal cord activation, and Korean, by how much breath is expelled. There have been attempts to lighten the load for Anglophone Korean learners such Romanization, a transliteration sys tem based on expressing Korean sounds with English orthography. However, relying on this method can hinder the Korean learner from achieving nativelike pronunciation since some Korean sounds have no equivalent in English. Often, the result of learning thr ough Romanization is the inaccurate, and sometimes unintelligible, pronunciation of Korean words as if they were English. In order to fill this gap of Korean pronunciation pedagogy, it is proposed in this paper that teaching Anglophones the phonetic signif icance of the consonants of the Korean alphabet Hangeul will help them achieve more nativelike fluency. Because the various shapes of the letters themselves signify the manner and location of production in the vocal tract, it is hypothesized that the expe riment participants will be able to not only learn native pronunciation, but do so without Romanization. like Korean However, in the beginning stages of the experiment, International Phonetic Alphabet transcriptions will be provided as an intermediary to guide the participants in their note At the end of the experiment, native Korean speakers will rate the degree of nativelike taking. pronunciation of each participant. Should this method of Korean pronunciation instruction prove successful, it could be ap plied in Korean language programs across the U.S., and be of use to other researchers who are also interested in alternate methods of language pronunciation pedagogy.