Training Effect on Korean EFL Students' Perception and Production of English Grapheme <e>

Abstract

Motivated by the fact that English vowel grapheme is pronounced as 3 different vowel sounds, the current study purports to investigate how Korean EFL students perceive and produce English words with grapheme and whether the difficulty associated with perceiving and producing can be improved by training. To this end, perception and production tasks were conducted to 31 Korean EFL students in the forms of the pre-test and post-test. The overall results showed that participants' production abilities were significantly improved while the perception abilities were not. Thus, the effect of training was attested only in production. Significant improvement for individual target vowels was also found in the production domain but not in the perception domain, suggesting that acquisition patterns differ for perception and production. In order to account for the asymmetry in training effects, cross-participant correlational approach was adopted. Since no correlation between perception and production accuracy of the participants was found, it was concluded that perception and production abilities of the participants were developing independently and thus, different acquisition patterns were not surprising.