Using Korean Visual Phonics as an Intervention to Improve Pronunciation for Foreign Speakers in Korea

In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of international people choosing to learn the Korean language. However, many of them are struggling to speak Korean because of the complexity of the Korean phonemic system. Korean visual phonics is a strategy that has been used to improve Korean pronunciation for international students. There is evidence suggesting that students who learned pronunciation of consonants using the visual phonics strategy showed significant improvement when compared to students using more traditional methods. The results for vowels, however, were mixed. The visual phonics group performed better with monophthongs than dipthongs. This could be attributed, in part, to the complexity of combining two different, yet related, signs to make a single compound vowel. Based on these results, we know that Korean visual phonics can be used to improve certain aspects of pronunciation for learners, specifically articulation and phonation.