ELT Students and Lecturers Beliefs About Pronunciation Instruction: The Case of a Turkish ELT Department

Abstract

Pronunciation instruction is an integral part of language teaching/learning processes. The aim of this study was to explore ELT students' and lecturers' beliefs on the learning and teaching of English pronunciation. A questionnaire containing Likert-type items probing the participants' views on pronunciation instruction was designed and administered to 125 students and 6 lecturers at an ELT department in Turkey. Additionally, the lecturers were interviewed via a semi-structured interview so as to gain a deeper insight into the subject matter. The lecturers stated that heavy accents have a discriminating effect among ESL speakers and they also strongly agreed with the idea that there exists an age limit in the learnability of pronunciation, while the students remained unsure about these two notions. Additionally, no significant difference was found between the lecturers and students, between genders, among the educational levels of the students, and the numbers of participants' native languages with regard to lecturers' and students' beliefs on pronunciation instruction. As for the conclusion, the analysis of the data revealed that (i) lecturers and students held different attitudes towards pronunciation, (ii) their perceptions on the challenges in pronunciation differed from each other, and (iii) lecturers believed that there was a vicious circle in the process of teaching/learning pronunciation.