Korean Students Prefer Truespel Phonetics

for Learning US English Pronunciation (May 2012)

from Hyung (TJ) Martin, President of The Martins Academy

of the Universal Language Institute

Summary: 

1.  ESL students learned truespel phonetics in an hour

2.  In a week they would "WRITE" phonetically

3.  Facilitated learning spelling of US English words.

4.  Facilitated learning US English pronunciation

5.  A potential choice to replace the IPA.

Universal Language Institute-The Martins Academy (UNI-TMA) teaches English to Korean students of 4th grade to graduate school levels. Most of them continue their English study in the US and Canada.  Consequently, we find it important for students to acquire proper pronunciation of English words—Asians in general are notorious for poor English pronunciation.  Unfortunately, many English dictionaries that these students reference vary in pronunciation guides. Specifically, popular American dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster or American Heritage contain different pronunciation guides.  Even Korean developed Korean-English or English-Korean dictionaries add further confusion because the dictionaries indiscriminately mixed British and American pronunciations in addition to varying pronunciation guides.  Compounding these problems is the symbols they use for the guides. All pronunciation guides, including the most widely used International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), use characters that are not found in common QWERTY keyboard or require additional effort like “shifting” to type capital letters, for example. These cause students to be alienated from them.

At UNI-TMA, we have identified Koreans’ English pronunciation problem early on and have searched for the solution. In truespel phonetics, we found the answer. With its 40 phonemes, we have been able to teach our students to familiarize truespel within an hour, and it took less than a week for the students to practice and apply truespel for their own note-taking of a word’s pronunciation that students used to write in their native writing, Hanguel, which inherently cannot reflect accurate English pronunciation. Word-to-truespel converter on the Internet also facilitated easy and rapid learning because the converter alleviated the burden of accurate truespel of words that non-English natives were handicapped because of their English pronunciation unfamiliarity. Although our application of truespel has been rather short, only a little over two months, we have found that truespel phonetics excelled over other forms of pronunciation guides in speed and ease of English word pronunciation acquisition as well as application by our students with added benefit of facilitating their accurate spelling of English words due to frequent conversion pattern.

 It appears that truespel possesses many advantages over other forms of pronunciation guides in that it is easy to learn and practice as well as convenient. While structured and objective comparison experiments are necessary to affirm our early apparent bias, our students’ current positive responses for truespel phonetics make it a potential choice for a global standard pronunciation guide that could even replace IPA

See a list of truespel tutorials at http://justpaste.it/useit

http://justpaste.it/koreatrials is the web edress of this note