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KOTESOL
Gwangju-Jeonnam Chapter
Monthly Workshop


Saturday, June 14
2:00�5:00

Chonnam National University
Humanities 1 Room 106
(Note: this is NOT the room we have been meeting in
lately!)

Schedule
2:00 pm
Registration and Welcome

2:30 pm
Using Literature in the EFL Class
Yeon-seong Park, Chonnam National University,
Department of English Language and Literature

3:20 pm
Snack Break

3:40 pm
Covert Contrast in Second Language Acquisition
Jin-A Lim, Chonnam National University, Department of
English Language and Literature

4:30 pm
Book Drawing

5:00 pm
Dinner


Admission:
Free for KOTESOL Members and first-time visitors
5,000 won for visitors


Using Literature in the EFL Class
Yeon-seong Park, Chonnam National University,
Department of English Language and Literature

In this presentation I want to share my exploration
of the benefits of using English literary works to
promote students' language skills. In my English for
Speech and Debate class of Spring 2008, I have
introduced �Funeral Blues� (W. H. Auden), excerpts
from To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) and Julius
Caesar (Shakespeare) as targeted speech samples. I�ll
show survey results from students and we will also
have a workshop using worksheets to promote the four
skills of English.

Yeon-seong Park has been working as an English
instructor at Chonnam National University since 2000.
She majored in English literature and holds a PhD. for
a thesis on W. H. Auden. She has been a member of
KOTESOL since 1999 and is now holding the position of
a chapter treasurer. This spring she received an award
for excellent teaching from the dean of Humanities at
CNU.

Covert Contrast in Second Language Acquisition
Jin-A Lim, Chonnam National University, Department of
English Language and Literature

The acquisition of a phonological contrast can appear
to be abrupt from the perspective of the listener, but
from the speaker�s perspective, there are gradual and
continuous developmental changes in the articulation
of the phonological categories in question.
Instrumental phonetic analysis can uncover this
continuity in articulation, both by revealing covert
contrasts and by uncovering the gradual and systematic
development of the phonetics/phonology interface. A
number of covert contrast, that is defined as a
statistically significant acoustic difference from the
target sound, are reported in the literature on first
language acquisition, covering the acquisition of
voice (Macken and Barton 1980), place (Gibbon 1990),
manner (Tyler 1995) and structure (Weismer 1984).

The acquisition of phonotactic constraints in second
language acquisition is normally analyzed using
transcriptions of interlanguage that is a systematic,
albeit �incorrect�, version of the target language
(Selinker 1972). Such an analysis is not complete
enough to reveal the acquisition of language
particular phonotactic constraints. The sequence of a
stop and a nasal across a morpheme boundary is allowed
in English (Giegerich 1992). But it is not allowed and
undergoes nasal assimilation in Korean (Ahn 1998;
Kim-Renaud 1974). A number of cues are used to convey
the phonotactically satisfied sequence in English. For
example, the sequence of a stop and a nasal in English
displays both primary (contrastive) cues, for example,
VOT as a cue to the stop /voice/, or secondary
(noncontrastive) cues such as vowel duration as a cue
to voicing of the following stop. Then a question
arises as to how Korean learners of English learn how
to integrate contrastive and noncontrastive cues.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that
imperceptible contrasts exist in an interlanguage. For
this purpose, we conduct a phonetic experiment where
we compared productions of expressions such as bat man
and bad man between Korean learners of English and
English native speakers. The results show that
productions of targets /tm/ and /dm/ that are
transcribed as [nm] are significantly different from
those of targets /tm/ and /dm/ in two respects. First,
the vowel is shorter before the derived nasal from the
voiceless stop than that from the voiced stop. Second,
the derived nasal from the voiced stop is shorter than
that from the voiceless stop. Target language errors
are a natural part of the language learning process.
This study shows that in the phonological development
in second language acquisition, there is a stage where
covert contrast is shown; there is a statistically
significant differences in vowel duration and
consonant duration.
This presentation will be based on a paper Jin-A will
be co-presenting at the 16th meeting of ICKL
(International Circle of Korean Linguistics) at
Cornell University in the U.S. on June 27th. She has
also presented her paper at the spring 2008 conference
of The Linguistic association of Korea.

Jin-A Lim has an MA in English linguistics with an A+
average. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in
English linguistics at Chonnam National University.
She is a caring mother of three children.



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