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영어

Korean and English have different syllable structures. Korean people, however, tend to apply Korean syllable structures to English words because of their utterance habits. The purpose of this paper is to examine to what degree Korean students are influenced by the utterance habits of their mother tongue when they speak English. To this end, I prepared two kinds of test materials, with 30 questions each, which were related to /ɨ/, /u/ or /i/ epenthesis. In the tests, 40 freshmen from Janghang Technical High School served as subjects. The subjects were divided into two groups, an experimental group and a control group. The tests consisted of two steps. First, I examined the degree of interference by the subjects' mother tongue in their pronunciation of English words. Next, after 40 days of instruction to the experiment group on the differences between English and Korean syllable structures, using a contrastive analysis, I examined their degree of improvement using the same method as the first experiment. The results of the experiments were as follows. In the first experiment, both the experimental group and the control group showed a similar degree of interference. The utterance ability of the experimental group, however, was improved in the second experiment. In conclusion, it was found that most of the subjects were greatly influenced by their mother tongue in English utterance, and that special teaching through a contrastive analysis of both languages could reduce native-language interference to some extent.