earticle

영어

This study reports a small but fully transcribed database of spontaneous English speech spoken by Korean learners of English. The spontaneous speech was gathered under a naturalistic setting, using a problem-solving task (called the Diapix task from Van Engen et al., 2010) involving two talkers. Using the database, we examined whether the communicative characteristics of Korean users’ English speech differ depending on the language background of the conversation partners with whom the Korean users interact in a given discourse. For this, we focused on examining how efficiently the Korean talkers communicated with their conversation partners by considering three primary measures, namely (i) how fast they completed the dialogue task, (ii) how balanced the conversation was, and (iii) how many types of English words they used. The data showed that for all three measures the native language background of the interlocutor with whom a Korean learner of English interacts in a dialogue affects the speech characteristics of the Korean learner of English. Discussions of the current results and implications of them are provided.