Perception and Awareness of English Vowels by Korean EFL Learners with Respect to English Language Proficiency

This paper investigates Korean EFL learners’ perception and awareness of English vowels in order to identify significant differences between the levels of language proficiency. The findings showed that the students’ level of proficiency had no effect on the vowel perception questionnaire, where they reported that the /ɑ/ is the easiest vowel to perceive while the /ɛ, æ/ are the most difficult to perceive. However, in terms of the feature [tense], the low-level group perceived the tense vowels as more difficult than the lax vowels, whereas the opposite was true for the intermediate-level group. Futhermore, the vowel awareness test results demonstrated that both the low-level and intermediate-level groups scored high for the /ɑ/ while they received low scores for the /ɪ/ and /ʊ/. In addition, these two groups both performed better on tense vowels than lax vowels. These findings indicated a gap between the learners’ perception and their awareness of the English vowels and highlight a need to design a curriculum that is tailored to the learners’ levels in order to increase effectiveness for L2 vowel pronunciation teaching.