A Study of Korean Production and Fluency as a Foreign Language.

Abstract

The study investigated what variables affected more on Korean raters` production and fluency judgement to the Korean speakings of the advanced foreign learners. Nine professional Korean raters assessed sixty Korean learners` oral performance. The results are as follows: (1) fluency judgement for the Korean speaking follows the cross-linguistic trends, (2) the principal variables in judging L2 fluency include speech rate, F0 range, and pause frequency, (3) mean length of runs (number of syllables) - representing how many words the subjects express within the given time - comparatively lower effect in judging the fluency. The study also found that the wide range of F0 causes the higher scores of the fluency marks. The result could support the evidence that F0 - exerting how the subjects express the active intonation - is one of the important production and fluency cues, regardless of the spectrum structure of the target language. The result implies that Korean speaking education should focus more on the active intonation. (Konkuk University, Seoul National University, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul National University, Seogang University, Seoul National University, Seoul National University)