Study of Listening Discrimination in Korean University Students

A listening experiment was conducted with 68 students of Chung Ang University in Seoul, South Korea. Most of the students were from the Department of English Education. This experiment was performed in a classroom with different classes of students. The goal of the experiment was to determine how well Korean students could discriminate the sounds of five English minimal pairs. The five minimal pairs tested were the following: light/right, sad/said, suffer/supper, pull/pool, and it/eat. Students had to choose the minimal pair which they heard and circle it on their piece of paper. Each minimal pair was listed five times for a total of 25 utterances. The author read the words on the list from start to finish a total of two times to ensure that students heard each word clearly.