earticle

영어

This study aims to investigate Korean-speaking elementary school teachers’ perceptions of teaching English pronunciation mainly from an EIL perspective. For this, a semi-structured questionnaire consisting of 11 items was conducted to 55 in-service Korean-speaking elementary school teachers. The results of this study were as follows: 1) The majority of the teachers tended to recognize the importance of pronunciation for communication while they lacked confidence in their pronunciation. 2) The majority of the teachers appeared to spend time on teaching English pronunciation, placing more focus on suprasegmentals than segmentals. 3) In the questions that could tap into the teachers’ perceptions of teaching English pronunciation from an EIL perspective, the majority of the teachers seemed to agree on the significance of intelligible, rather than native-like, pronunciation; Approximately half or more than half of the teachers tended to prefer native English speakers and accents to nonnative ones as instructional models, be hesitant to expose their students to a variety of English accents, and perceive native English accents as superior to nonnative ones in linguistic value and importance; Two-thirds of the teachers regarded both native and nonnative speakers as the owners of English. Based on these findings, suggestions were made for teacher education and materials development concerning English pronunciation.