Perception and production of English vowels by Korean learners: A Case study

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between perception and production of English vowels by Korean EFL learners. To this end, 21 Korean students participated in perception and production tests in order to probe the extent to which the perception and production accuracies conform to each other. Overall, the participants had difficulty perceiving and producing English vowels since the mean accuracies of perception and production only amounted to 60%. The results showed that perception accuracy was not always higher than production accuracy, which runs counter to the traditional assumption that perception precedes production. Moreover, it was revealed that no significant correlation between perception and production was found, thus suggesting that perception and production may not be related and that perception and production capabilities may be developing independently depending on vowels and individuals. As for the results of the perception test, monophthong and short vowels were more difficult to perceive in relation to their counterpart diphthong and long vowels. Regarding the results of the production test, the participants were better at producing tense vowels than lax vowels. In addition, confusion matrixes for perception and production were presented and confusion patterns as well as the direction of confusability are discussed in detail.