Korean High School Learners' English Rhythm and Comprehensibility

Abstract

Since English has attained an important role as an international language, a number of diverse global dialects have become recognized. This has had a significant impact on the area of English pronunciation acquisition as the goal to be achieved is being changing with the major focus now shifting from phonemic level targets to the overall intelligibility. Understanding the suprasegmental rules appears central to this new goal, with particular mention given to stress and rhythm as the important elements. Yet, Korean learners are subject to make inappropriate rhythm units opposed to the nature of English rhythm, in that Korean belongs to syllable timing and English to stress-timing. Therefore, the present study proposed the three research questions as follows: (a) are there differences in speech rhythm between the Korean EFL learners and the native speakers of English?

(b) are there differences in speech rhythm between the more proficient and the less proficient learners?

(c) does Korean EFL learners sentence stress affect native speakers comprehensibility of speech rhythm? The two main experiments to solve the research questions were implemented with a total of 21 Korean EFL high school students and 3 native speakers. The first experiment was divided into the two sub-tests: the one was to investigate the speech rhythm comparing the score of nPVI-V and nFPVI between Korean learners and native speakers, and the other was to apply the same metrics measuring two 6 more proficient groups against 15 less proficient groups to manifest the different effects based on the proficiency level. The comprehensibility test was conducted by 3 native speakers in order to assess how much the learners speech rhythm affects the native speakers comprehensibility. The major findings of the present study suggest that the Korean learners did not seem to use a stress pattern to achieve the English rhythm. There were significant different results of the nPVI-V scores between the non-native and the native speakers. One argument yet to be discussed was the fact that nFPVI did not seem to support the typology of two different languages in terms of the rhythm unit. With regard to the nature of the regular occurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables in English, a foot unit is supposed to generate an English isochrony. In this respect, the native speakers were expected to have the lower scores of nFPVI and the Korean speakers were anticipated to make the higher scores of nFPVI. Nonetheless, the results failed to show the different nFPVI between the two language groups and the two groups of the different proficiency level. Furthermore, the scores of comprehensibility ratings based on the speech rhythm serve to indicate that the speech rhythm might affect the native speakers comprehensibility. Therefore, it can be concluded that Korean learners of English do not appear to make the English speech rhythm when conducting speech performance. These findings present the understandings on the speech rhythm by Korean EFL learners, and contribute to illuminating the importance of stress and the rhythm unit on the pronunciation teaching.