earticle

영어

This paper argues that intelligibility should be a modest and realistic goal in current pronunciation teaching. Accordingly, I suggest that suprasegmental features such as syllables, stress, and rhythm should be taught explicitly in formal pronunciation classrooms to enhance the level of intelligibility. The lack of stress in Korean leads Korean EFL speakers to have lots of difficulties in speech production and perception. These difficulties arise mostly from Korean learners’ tendency to place prominence on every syllable and, in particular, on the first syllable of a word, which I dub the Initial Prominence Phenomenon in this paper. Rhythm, another important suprasegmental feature, plays the most significant part in enhancing Korean learners’ level of intelligibility. Furthermore, rhythm is treated as the most prominent key factor that characterizes Korean EFL learners as a foreigner.