Foreign language learners’ views on the importance of learning the target language pronunciation

Abstract

Pronunciation is one of the controversial topics in the field of English language teaching as a second or foreign language. The aim of this study is to understand the attitudes of prep class students at Kastamonu University (state university) in Turkey towards the importance of pronunciation in language learning. Therefore, a pronunciation attitude inventory (PAI) was implemented in order to achieve this goal. 58 students who were from different majors such as business management, forest engineering, tourism and hotel management, etc. attended the research at total, and they were asked to give their opinions about 12 statements by using five-point Likert scale aiming at eliciting the attitudes of the participants from the strongest (always or almost always true of me) to the weakest (never or almost never true of me). The descriptive results of the answers were analyzed by using SPSS 16 program. The responses given to the items in the questionnaire that intended to figure out the attitudes of the participants towards correct pronunciation in learning foreign language prove that pronunciation conveys a significant role in the target language learning, and it needs to be specifically handled by the instructors throughout the teaching process.

Keywords

• Pronunciation; attitudes; adult learners; foreign language learning

İsmail Çakır a *, Birtan Baytar b

Abstract

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