The Role of Awareness in Korean L2 Learners

The Role of Awareness in Korean L2 Learners

This study explores the role of awareness in L2 learning through investigating Korean EFL learners' perception of optional epenthetic stops in English. Stop epenthesis is a language-specific phonetic variation which is hard for even native speakers to perceive and is never consciously taught or learned in the environment of English language teaching situation of Korea. One native speaker of English produced phonotactically possible English nonwords containing the environment for stop epenthesis in which three nasals /m, n, η/ and a lateral /l/ are followed by each of the sibilants /s, θ, f/. It was revealed that epenthetic stops occurred between nasals and sibilants, but that there was no stop insertion after the laterals. Two proficiency groups (high vs. low) of Korean learners of English were asked to listen to the native speaker's recording and detect any target stops within the test words to see if they perceive the epenthetic stops spoken by the native speaker. There existed a significant group difference in the perception of epenthetic stops, which means that Korean EFL learners improve their ability to perceive English epenthetic stops as their overall English proficiency grows. considering that Korean EFL learners received no formal instruction and they were never aware of the presence of epenthetic stops, the dissociation of L2 learning and awareness is supported from the present study.