A Study On The Rhythmic Pattern Of English By Korean Chinese College Students

The difference of speech rhythm between English and Korean results in the Korean Chinese learners of English transfers the rhythmic pattern of Korean in their acquisition of English speech rhythm. So the rhythmic pattern of English is a difficult point for the Korean Chinese students to learn spoken English. Thus, this paper conducts two experiments. The first experiment aims to analyze the differences of rhythmic pattern between English and Korean, and the second experiment is to summarize the rhythmic pattern of English produced by Korean Chinese college students.Through the comparative analysis of the rhythmic pattern between English and Korean, this paper finds that the rhythmic patterns of English and Korean are different. Firstly, the standard deviation for consonantal intervals of English is higher than that of Korean. Korean’s the percentage of vocalic intervals is significantly higher than that of English. It shows that Korean has simple syllable structure, and Korean utterances are composed of relatively a larger portion of vocalic intervals than English utterances. Secondly, for raw PVI for consonantal intervals and normalized PVI for vocalic intervals, the results of the Korean are lower than that of English. If the result of PVI is low, it means that units of speech tend to appear at regular time intervals. Therefore, all results indicate that Korean is regarded as a syllable-timed whereas English is regarded as a stress-timed language.Through the analysis of the rhythmic pattern of English produced by ten Korean Chinese college students, this paper gets the following results. Firstly, Korean Chinese students have a higher percentage of vocalic intervals than that of native English speakers. It indicates that Korean Chinese students have less vowel reduction when they speak English. Secondly, Korean Chinese college students have lower normalized PVI for vocalic intervals and varcoV. The overall analysis of the data shows that Korean Chinese students have been affected by their mother tongue. The rhythmic pattern of English by Korean Chinese students contains a less variability between the full vowel and the reduced vowel. Therefore, Korean Chinese college students differ from native English speakers on rhythmic pattern of. The rhythmic pattern of English by native speakers is stress-timed, whereas the rhythmic pattern of English by Korean Chinese college students is close to the rhythmic pattern of Korean.Finding of this thesis will be beneficial for Korean Chinese college students to improve spoken English and provide guidance for the teachers to teach English pronunciation for Chinese college students.