Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Big_Bird]

Hello again,

1) Can any teachers describe ways in which students' first language (Korean) interferes with their acquisition of English? Any problem at all is of interest.

2) How do you go about remedying a particular problem.

All answers are appreciated, even if you only discuss question 1.

Cheers!

[keithinkorea]

Some of it is laziness regarding pronunciation. Changee, muchee, pinishee, it is really hard to get them to correct this but you got to correct them every time; just like spelling mistakes.

Another of their problems is past tense 'ed' it can be pronounced as 'id'-'d' or 't'. Parrot's 'Grammar for English Teachers' is a great book and gives good explanations re helping students with these issues.

Irregular verbs are difficult too, how many times do we see and hear such mistakes as 'speaked' or 'swimmed'.

Konglish is one of the main enemies that a Korean English student has too deal with. Koreans are surrounded by so much poor standard English that it is no wonder they struggle sometimes. 'Have a good time', 'Hi Seoul', 'New Face Everday' and all that nonsense they have on their tshirt and pencil cases.

L1 Korean speakers have a hard time learning English, they find Japanese a lot easier to learn.

[Old fat expat]

English is driven by vowels-just look at a spectrogram. The bands you see are called formants and they generally take precidence over consonants. Also look at the time-for a single utterance like 'ga', 80% of the sound is carried by the vowel.

There are many more 'true' vowels in English than Hungal. The diphthongs in Hungal are combinations of semi-vowels y and w. English diphthongs are combinations of short vowels (ai-ei-ao-oa-oo-ea-oi; can't give you the IPA symbols here).

I see many teachers advising working on consonants (l-r, p-b, th-f etc) not realizing that its the vowels where most progress can be made. For example, English has 6 'o' sounding vowels while Hungal has 3 (not counting the semi-vowel combos 'wo-yo' in Hungal because English has those but doesn't count them as vowels). Just imagine how much pronunciation is screwed up if for half of the vowels there is no phonological awareness, let alone ability to utter.

Well, that is just where I start-but language is our most complex behavior so there is bound to be many other areas. I am presently looking at order of acquisition and figuring a way to build language layers.

If anyone has some ideas or sites to go to, that would be cool.

[dulouz]

I had a discussion about the pronounciation of "A", like in "I have a cat".
The discussion was about the pronounciation of A like in "hey" vs uh, like "I have uh cat". English books made by Koreans actually instruct students to say "uh".

I was recently fixated on making students answer in complete sentences. It was unpleseant for everyone. Hangumal formalizes a very efficient verbage. It turns out those awkwardly brief answers in English are actually formal in Hangumal and considered a very good use of the language.

[memorabilis]

The SHOULD say "I have uh cat." THis is the unstressed unclear vowel "schwa" that should be reduced. "A" cat is not the focus of the sentence.

[Teufelswacht]

In my opinion the basic problem rests with the conflict between the phonotactics of English and Korean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics

[mithridates]

Behold! The easiest language for Koreans to learn (in theory):

http://ca.geocities.com/handydad/elomi/elomi-main.html

Except for maybe another constructed language based on Korean and Japanese, but there wouldn't be a need for that.







If I were as rich as Bill Gates the meanest thing I could do is make and promote a language that would be as hard as possible for them to learn. Everything would be made of l, r, f, p, b, v, and so on. Lots of double consonants too.

Bottle = bavfep
Cup = favbef
Chair = frlavel
I want the chair = frlavelvar fif s'feral
I don't want the cup = favbefvar fif res'feral

Man, that would be so mean.

[dulouz]

[Col.Brandon]

Big_Bird, can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

[Privateer]

This is just such a huge topic it's scary.

The reason students constantly misuse the words 'funny' and 'delicious' is the influence of Korean.

[tomato]

Korean word order interferes.

Since Korean is SOV, they expect English to be SOV.
My kindergarten students tell me, "Brendan Alex hit."
The elementary school boys tease the girls by saying, "Susan teacher I-love-you."

Yesterday, I gave a lesson on prepositions.
That isn't easy, because Korean has postpositions instead.
So the students tried to tell me "Book table on."

[crazylemongirl]

Actually something that I've noticed with students is that because english doesn't have formalized registers for verbs that they don't think about their word choice. For instance, I've had a few of them say to me 'hey, what's up?', but I have to explain to them that as a teacher, they shouldn't be saying that to me.

[vox]

the two problems that have come up most frequently for me are the use of the tongue in creating L-R (L versus flipped R, and curled R versus L) sounds in combination with other letters (fighting that Korean character matrix combination of consonant+vowel) and the inconsistent 's' sound applied in English.

When I taught singing I used to teach a lot about geography of the mouth since the tongue needs to be low and relaxed and vowels often get modified. Anyway I explain the pronunciation gap using aural cues plus a visual (my hands representing the action of the tongue approaching versus touching against the alveolar ridge) and then I show what they're doing and what they need to be doing. Then they all practice it with very tangible targets in mind. I'm sure it sounds useless to everybody here but I can teach it effectively, and it sticks, especially if you're really clear and simple about the description right off. Usually getting it concise the first time is key to their perception of their ability to grasp it. One of the things that gave me the most difficult time learning French was that for a while nobody explained there are some totally new sounds I must learn that have no parallel in English. So I find they have to get used to this concept that some of the sounds will be totally new and you have to take them there and you have to teach them effectively - they can't approximate sounds from Korean.

Speaking of which, the second thing is one particular hangeul character set they have, be damned if I can make it here without hangeul script but anyway it's a real rule in Korean pronunciation and it causes them to stop pronouncing 's'es on the ends of words.

The syllable (character 'box') has four symbols together:

0 l
^^

This syllable is pronounced something like 'idth' Apparently the 's' symbols (doubled and on the bottom, hence at the end of the syllable) get muted from 's' to 'dth' in this configuration. Anyhow from time to time it seems some Korean students need to be reminded that this rule doesn't transfer over to English because English 's' sounds are always pronounced. So I usually draw an arrow from that Korean to English and then put a big 'x' through it. It has to be happening a lot though for me to bring it up.

[some waygug-in]

My 2 cents;

Not that I would know much but this is something I've noticed.

Koreans tend to avoid learning to read English, they always translate everything and even write hangeul approximations for common English words that they are supposedly learning.

This of course leads to things like mis-pronunciation of black as "bleck",
horse as "holse" etc.

I'm not saying this is the only or even the main reason for the problem, but it is a significant one.

I don't know how many supposed level 5 or 6 students I've had who can't even read simple 3 letter words. Until they start going back to the basics and getting kids to really learn to pronounce words directly from the English letters, they are accomplishing nothing.

[riley]

First, I have to agree with what a lot of people are saying. Also, Old Fat Expat made a good point about the huge amount of vowel sounds.
I would add to that to say that because hangeul was written for only one language, each character makes a specific sound, unlike the alphabet which is at least 3,000 years old and is used by many languages in some form or another. This makes it difficult for 2nd language aquisition.
Another thing is that we have a plethora of words that are all slightly similar but sometimes have different connotations. That can also make it difficult.
As far as Korean learning style (slightly different topic) what I feel hinders them is that they rely too much on translation (this applies to a higher level), not enough time spent reading, and trying to learn "fad" words or following the latest idea of learning.