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Teach English in Shuanghe Zhen - Ankang Shi

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In this summative task, I will be discussing pronunciation problems in South Korea, as I am currently a middle and elementary school teacher in South Korea and see many of the same mistakes and struggles again and again. To begin, there are many sounds in the English language that simply do not exist in the Korean language, and this causes a multitude of pronunciation difficulties for Korean learners of English. Examples of these sounds include ‘f’, ‘v’, ‘x’ and hard ‘r’ sounds, as well as combination sounds such as ‘urt’ in the world ‘turtle’. This is even further complicated through the use of the phonetic spelling of English words using Korean characters- Hangeul- as well as the application of Korean language rules to English words. Firstly, I will discuss the lack of certain sounds in the Korean language that we use often in English, or sounds that are similar but still distinctly different. As I mentioned previously, there are many sounds such as ‘f’ and ‘v’ that are completely absent in the Korean language. This means that Korean English learners have difficulty accurately producing these sounds, or hearing the differences between the Korean way to make the sound and the English way. The best example I have of this is the word ‘turtle’. Due to the hard ‘r’ sound, and the lack of a hard ‘r’ in Korean, this is an incredibly difficult word for Koreans to say. Often, ‘turtle’ becomes ‘tuttle’ and the ‘r’ is skipped entirely. This difficulty is also seen in words like ‘red’, which becomes ‘led’, and rabbit, which becomes ‘labbit’. This is due to the Korean character ㄹ being a somewhat combined l/r sound that leans more towards an ‘l’ as we know it in English, but often being “translated” as an ‘r’ when phonetically writing (more on this in a moment). These same issues arise in ‘f’ which becomes a ‘p’ sound due to the lack of an ‘f’ in Korean, and ‘v’ becoming a ‘b’ because there’s no ‘v’ in Korean either. This also means that the pronunciation of things such as the stand-alone letter ‘v’ becomes ‘bwi’ instead of ‘vee’, and stand-alone ‘f’ becomes ‘ehpuh’ and not ‘eff’ because of the following topic. The main culprit of this pronunciation struggle is teaching students at a very young age how to use Hangeul to spell and pronounce English words phonetically. Common examples of this are ‘fish’ becoming ‘pishie’, ‘lunch’ becoming ‘lunchie’, violin ‘biolin’, etc. In my experience, students would rather take 5 minutes to “translate” these words into phonetic spelling that is easier for them, than take that same amount of time to read and sound out the words that they see. If a student has trouble reading or takes a moment longer than their teacher likes, I’ve personally witnessed the teacher walk over and phonetically spell every word on the page for them. In this manner, students never learn proper pronunciation. Finally, one of the greatest struggles for a Korean learner of English, is that they try to apply Korean language rules to English. As mentioned previously with phonetic spelling, ‘fish’ becoming ‘pishie’ happens because there are no stand-alone consonants in Korean, therefore the phonetic transcribing of English words follows the same rules. The ‘sh’ at the end simply cannot be, and so the extra ‘ie’ sound is added to make the word more comfortable and familiar to say. In summary, the major differences in linguistic sounds and letters cause many major pronunciation difficulties for Koreans. It is because of these things coming together cumulatively that Korean learners of English have a very hard time with the pronunciation of English words, but it is not impossible for them. Teaching proper phonetics and ensuring there is sufficient drilling for particularly difficult words goes a very long way in helping Koreans to get used to English pronunciation and forming the habit of using these different sounds when speaking English.


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