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영어

The purpose of this study is to analyze Korean university students' English vowel spelling-to-sound correspondences errors and suggest an efficient method for teaching English pronunciation. A total of 85 university students participated in this study and a questionnaire with 18 items was administered to the students. The questionnaire consists of the English learning environments for learners, and English nonsense words based on 5 English vowel letters. According to Celce-Mercia, Brinton, & Goodwin(2002), vowels have two kinds of vowel sounds. One is called tense vowel, the other lax vowel. Therefore, 5 English vowel letters are pronounced into lax vowel sounds and tense vowel sounds in one syllable word. The findings are as follows; 1) the errors of lax vowels are more than those of tense vowels. 2) within lax vowels, o-/ɑ/ and within tense vowels, u-/uw/ have the most errors among vowel sounds. 3) among English vowel letter-to-sound correspondences, the errors of o-/ɑ/ are ranked the first. 4) there is a direct correlation between the score of TOEIC and errors. 5) there is no correlation between the experience of learning phonics and errors. Based on the findings, some pedagogical suggestions are made for the letter-to-sound correspondences for an efficient English pronunciation teaching. (Korea Nazarene University)