"I want to have a good pronunciation. I am worrying because I have a bad pronunciation." This is a common question that my students often ask me these days. What's a good pronunciation? Saying 'warrer' instead of 'water'? Pronunciation is the most important area when it comes to learning English for Korean students. A good pronunciation means he or she is well educated and the person's high social status.
What is pronunciation? It consists of segmentals and suprasegmentals. Many Korean students focus on segmentals factors. However, natives speakers tend to be affected by 'stress' when they speak with non-native English speakers. So, I would like to recommend you to practice more on 'stress' and 'intonation.'
I remember an American accent class I took when I was in Newyork. It was not that enjoyable because it was like pretending to be an American. So, my question is, what the ideal pronunciation for Korean English speakers is. I would like to answer for this, a pronunciation that has Korean's speaking habit and has no problem to convey what we want to say properly like Ban Ki-moon, the General Secretary of United Nation.
In brief, my conclusion for this is that our objective to practice english is not speaking like a native English speaker, but improving our interactive ability. It is natural to speak English with Korean accent since Korean is definately our first language. Interactive ability means you can make others understood with using various expressions. This is the key point in my English classes.
Sun-ha Lee from
Internet News Team of Korea Economy TV
Link: http://media.daum.net/society/others/newsview?newsid=20121005102107844
by 함현진 from the Intermediate Conposition #3
I completely agree. The focus is on comprehensibility and not "nativeness". As nearly anyone in my field would tell you, there is no such thing as a single model for pronunciation. The goal should be to be understood.
ReplyDelete