Teach English in Fengyi XiAng - Anqing Shi

Problems for Korean Learners english, like most other languages, is a fairly difficult language to learn. All foreign learners, regardless of their cultural and first language background, face language hurdles when it comes to acquiring english phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, prosody, and pragmatics. These challenges present themselves as a result of transference and interference of the native language into and with english, the second language.This paper specifically focuses on the distinct problems of Korean learners of english in phonology, morphology, and syntax, as these present the greatest challenges. As the paper will illustrate, Korean learners have a great number of difficulties when learning english pronunciation, verb tense, and sentence structure and orderdue to the significant differences between the two languages. Perhaps the most well-known or stereotypical problem associated with Koreans speaking english is the inability to pronounce or mispronunciation of certain english consonants that are absent from Korean phonetics.Some of these include the /?/ and /ð/ sounds in words such as then and thirteen, the /v/ and /f/ sounds, the /r/ and /l/ sounds, and the /s/ sound. The /?/ and /ð/ sounds do not exist in Korean, presenting problems when it comes to pronunciation of words containing these sounds. The labiodental /v/ and /f/ sounds are also not present. These two sounds are most often replaced with the bilabial /b/ and /p/ sounds, respectively(Shoebottom).The /r/ and /l/ sounds do not exist as distinct sounds in Korean. Rather, they exist as one liquid sound that is represented by the same character in the Korean written script, Hangeul. Therefore, Korean students have a hard time distinguishing /r/ from /l/(Cho, 2004).The /s/ sound does exist in Korean. However, many Korean students have the unfortunate tendency to skip this sound. Also, whenever a /s/ sound occurs in front of the /i:/ or /?/ sounds, Koreans tend to mispronounce /s/ as /?/(Bauman, 2006). Instead of saying city or seen, Korean students tend to say shity and sheen, respectively.This is a direct result of first language interference into english. In Korean, the /s/ and /?/ sounds are represented by the same letter, but the letter is only pronounced as /?/ when it occurs before the /i:/ or /?/ sounds.The issue of vowels is another challenge to Korean learners of english. In particular, english vowel sounds /?/ and /?/are difficult to pronounce as they do not exist in Korean. In the case of the sound /?/, Korean students tend to replace the sound with the Korean /o/. When learning and trying to produce the sound /?/, Koreans generally feel uncomfortable as this vowel sound lacks stress. Koreans tend to place full stress on vowel sounds (Cho, 2004). Morphologically, Korean is an agglutinative language meaning that verb tense, mood, sentence type, and social relation between the speaker and listener are added successively to the end of the verb. In fact, Korean consists of more than 100 particles and 600 affixes (Ford, 2000). On the other hand, english uses lots of auxiliaries to convey verb tense and meaning. For this reason, Korean learners of english face major difficulties when encountering the many verb tenses used in english.For example, in Korean a single past tense is used, whereas in english the past tense itself has several variations (Shoebottom). Another morphological difference arises in the syllabic structure of the words. Korean language, for the most part, follows a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) structure, whereas in english it is not uncommon to see a word with three consecutive consonant sounds, such as strong, for example. Korean students have a tendency to insert an extra vowel between the consonants(Cho, 2004). This would result in them pronouncing strong as suh-tuh-rong. When it comes to syntax, or sentence structure, the major problem that exists is that the Korean language uses a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order while english uses a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. For example, in english one says, ?I love you.? In Korean, the same sentence is spoken as ?Naega neol saranghe,? or ?I you love.?Of interest to note is that in Korean, the subject and object are optional in several cases and oftentimes one or both are eliminated. In the case of the above statement, it is perfectly alright in Korean to just say, ?Saranghe.? Another syntactic issue is the positioning of adverbs. This is due to the fact that, in Korean, modifiers come before modified elements(Cho, 2004). For example, in Englishone says walk quickly, while in Korean the phrase is flipped to quickly walk. However, this is a problem that can be easily fixed through lots of language practice. While these major problems and many others cause difficulty for Korean learners of english, they should not be the cause of too much stress for either the student or the teacher. None of these problems is insurmountable. On the other hand, some problems, especially pronunciation, may take much longer to correct than others. However, with patience, repetition, and consistent effort, Korean students can learn english and become very clearspeakers of the language. SOURCES Bauman, N. R. (2006). A Catalogue of Errors Made by Korean Learners of english. Retrieved December 2, 2011, from ESL Pedagogy: http://onlinepedagogy.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/a-catalogue-of-errors-made-by-korean-learners-of-english/ Cho, B.-E. (2004). Issues Concerning Korean Learners of english: english Education in Korea and Some Common Difficulties of Korean Students. The East Asian Learner, Vol. 1 (2), 31-36. Ford, S. (2000). A Sketch of the Korean Language. Retrieved December 2, 2011, from University of Hawaii: http://www2.Hawaii.edu/~sford/research/korean2/index.html Shoebottom, P. (n.d.). The differences between english and Korean. Retrieved December 2, 2011, from Frankfurt International School ESL: http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/korean.htm