earticle

영어

English and Korean have a distinct phonemic system with different number of phonemes and with phonemes that are not equivalent. These phonemic differences in the two languages cause Korean learners of English to have difficulties in acquiring English vowels and consonants, sometimes leading to communication breakdowns. This paper aims to investigate how the English textbooks, currently used in middle schools since 2000, include the vowels that are troublesome to Korean learners. My concern is, however, limited only about the strong vowels among the phonemes in the textbooks. To do this, the phonetic alphabets used in the textbook are not only reviewed but also compared to those by some representative phoneticians and the vowel chart of English by Ladefoged (1982) and that of Korean by Hyeonbok Lee (1989) are compared, in order to select some pairs of vowels that are not easy for Korean students to acquire. Some results of analysis are discussed and then the corresponding relation between spelling and pronunciation, not the one between phoneme and pronunciation, is presented as another result of study. In the end, some suggestions are given that should be considered when producing the next middle school English textbooks.