Survey of Awareness and Actual Conditions Regarding Pronunciation Teaching: Based on a Questionnaire Survey of Korean Learners of Japanese

In this paper, A questionnaire survey was conducted among Korean learners of Japanese to clarify learners' attitudes and actual conditions toward pronunciation teaching, and to explore issues in current pronunciation teaching of Japanese in Korea. The results yielded the following four results. The first is that both Japanese majors and non–majors feel the need for pronunciation teaching. In particular, It was confirmed that Japanese majors have a strong desire for pronunciation teaching. On the other hand, there are a certain number of students who find pronunciation teaching burdensome. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the burden on students by explaining that voice education is part of the process of developing Japanese language skills and by devising teaching methods and teachers' attitudes when conducting pronunciation teaching. Second, although learners consider pronunciation and vocabulary important as elements that are easily understood by listeners, less than half of the learners had received pronunciation teaching. Therefore, it is necessary to construct lessons so that learners can learn to speak in a way that is easily understood by listeners. Third, learners believe that traditional methods of pronunciation teaching and even short periods of instruction are effective. From this result, it can be said that even a small amount of time for pronunciation teaching can be effective. Fourth, on the other hand of the results obtained in the third section, pronunciation teaching in Korea may still be conducted using conventional methods that are thought to be ineffective. The results of the survey showed that the method of pronunciation teaching that learners consider effective is the one in which they listen to the teacher read out the text or material, the learners imitate the pronunciation of the text or material, and the teacher corrects the pronunciation if there is any mispronunciation, and learners are willing to receive such instruction in the future. These findings suggest that teachers need to pay more attention to pronunciation teaching as well.