Exploring Japanese EFL Learners’ Attitudes Toward English Pronunciation and its Relationship to Perceived Accentedness

Abstract

This study investigates what individual differences may play a role in second language (L2) learners’ pronunciation, exploring whether English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ attitudes toward English is linked to their perceived accentedness. Japanese EFL secondary school students (N = 62) carried out a 69-word read-aloud task and their speech samples were evaluated by 16 raters for accentedness. A ten-item questionnaire examined the attitudes toward L2 pronunciation of Japanese EFL learners. From the questionnaire, an exploratory factor analysis revealed three dimensions: pronunciation significance, interest in English sounds, and confidence in pronunciation. However, only confidence in pronunciation was significantly correlated with accentedness scores. Results are discussed in terms of the relationship between affective factors and L2 pronunciation attainment.

Keywords

Accentedness attitudes EFL pronunciation speech assessment

1 Introduction

Individual characteristics of second language (L2) learners, such as age, attitudes, and aptitude, have been investigated to explain why there are differences among L2 learners’ language attainment. To measure L2 learners’ language attainment, researchers have used grammaticality judgment tests (e.g., Johnson & Newport, 1989) and language proficiency tests such as the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). Within the domain of L2 pronunciation specifically, ultimate attainment has been measured through acoustic analysis and judgments from human raters. Most recently, two dimensions of pronunciation assessed through rater judgments, comprehensibility and accentedness, have been used by researchers to evaluate L2 learners’ attainment. Whereas comprehensibility refers to how easily a listener understands a speech sample, accentedness focuses on how closely the speaker approximates a first language (L1) variety (Munro & Derwing, 1995).

Although researchers have advocated for comprehensibility as the primary goal for L2 teaching and learning (e.g., Levis, 2005), L2 learners themselves often desire to attain nativelike pronunciation (Tokumoto & Shibata, 2011). People with heavy accent may be perceived as being loyal to their primary ethnic group by keeping their L1 traits in L2 speech (Gatbonton, Trofimovich, & Magid, 2005). Due to their relative salience, however, nonstandard accents have often been targets of pedagogical intervention (Rubin & Smith, 1990) because they have been perceived as being socially unacceptable (e.g., Lippi-Green, 2012; Milroy & Milroy, 1999) and may make it difficult for listeners to process the speech (e.g., Derwing & Rossiter, 2002; Varonis & Gass, 1982). As a result, some L2 speakers wish to avoid or minimize the extent to which they speak accented varieties.

The desire to attain nativelike pronunciation is often found in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts (Bai & Yuan, 2019; Timmis, 2002; Tokumoto & Shibata, 2011; Uchida & Sugimoto, 2019). For instance, Tokumoto and Shibata (2011) found that Japanese university students showed strong negative attitudes toward their own accent while hoping to sound like native speakers. More recently, Uchida and Sugimoto (2019) showed that the majority of 100 Japanese secondary school teachers of English wanted to attain nativelike pronunciation and believed that their students should minimize their Japanese accent in L2 speech. That is, although comprehensibility has been promoted as an L2 learning goal for successful communication, achieving nativelike pronunciation still appears to be an L2 learning and teaching goal in a certain context. However, considering the fact that EFL learners typically receive minimum L2 input (Larson-Hall, 2008), an interesting question is whether EFL learners’ ability to produce less accented speech is influenced by individual differences.

The role of individual differences in L2 pronunciation was explored initially by examining how L2 speech performance varies by age, including age of arrival in an L2-spoken country (e.g., Baker & Trofimovich, 2006), age of learning (e.g., Bongaerts, van Summeren, Planken, & Schils, 1997; Flege, Munro, & MacKay, 1995; Uzal, Peltonen, Huotilainen, & Aaltonen, 2015) and age of immersion (e.g., Munro & Mann, 2005). Additional individual differences associated with L2 pronunciation attainment include L1 background (e.g., Crowther, Trofimovich, Saito, & Isaacs, 2015), L2 oral proficiency level (e.g., Saito, Trofimovich, & Isaacs, 2016), attitudes (Elliot, 1995; Kissling, 2014; Moyer, 2007), and motivation (Moyer, 1999; Saito, Dewaele, Abe, & In’nami, 2018; Smit, 2002). Although numerous studies have shown that it is considerably challenging to attain nativelike pronunciation after puberty (e.g., Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2009; Johnson & Newport, 1989), the fact that some L2 speakers do reach pronunciation levels on a par with L1 varieties (e.g., Bongaerts et al., 1997) has led researchers to explore whether individual differences in affective factors can account for variation in pronunciation attainment.

In terms of affective factors, there are many studies examining language learners’ motivation and their L2 pronunciation attainment. For instance, Saito, Dewaele and Hanzawa (2017) found that EFL Japanese university students’ improvement in speech comprehensibility over a 15-week period was linked to their motivation to improve comprehensibility. Later, based on Dörnyei’s (2005) L2 Motivational Self System, Saito et al. (2018) found that EFL Japanese secondary school students’ comprehensibility was related to the Ideal L2 Self (the clear visualization of how L2 speakers would use English in certain contexts). In addition to motivation, learners’ attitudes can be another important factor in relation to L2 attainment, which may be tied to their motivation and behavior. Attitude refers to the degree in which a person evaluates a psychological object in bipolar dimensions such as like and dislike (Ajzen, 2001). The possible link between attitudes and motivation has been reported that L2 speakers who have positive attitudes toward the importance of improving pronunciation showed clearer imagination of themselves using the L2 with target language speakers (Huensch & Thompson, 2017). Also, L2 speakers who gained self-confidence through their L2 experience (e.g., studying abroad) were found to be more motivated and showed positive attitudes toward L2 pronunciation learning (Uchida & Sugimoto, 2019). Such confidence and positive attitudes may eventually affect how L2 learners develop their skills; L2 speakers who had positive attitudes toward pronunciation learning were found to be less anxious about L2 learning and reported using more strategies to improve pronunciation than their peers (Sardegna, Lee, & Kusey, 2018).

Examining the relationship between attitudes and L2 speakers’ performance, L2 speakers who have greater confidence and positive attitudes toward the target language (Moyer, 2007) or who are more concerned about L2 pronunciation (Elliot, 1995; Nagle, 2018; Purcell & Suter, 1980; Shively, 2008; Suter, 1976) are likely to be judged as having less-accented L2 speech. For instance, Moyer (2007) found that English L2 speakers with a positive attitude toward language or high confidence in their performance were perceived as being less accented. Similarly, Elliot (1995) reported a correlation between positive attitudes toward L2 pronunciation and L2 Spanish speakers’ performance. Shively (2008) adopted the same questionnaire designed by Elliot to examine the relationship between the concern for improving L2 pronunciation and segmental accuracy of L2 Spanish speakers’ production. She found that L2 speakers with extreme (i.e., the highest and lowest) concern for improving pronunciation showed higher accuracy scores than their peers. However, the questionnaire used to elicit their attitudes about L2 pronunciation did not shed light on specific dimensions underlying their pronunciation attitudes. Furthermore, other studies have shown that concern for pronunciation accounted for little of the variance in pronunciation attainment (Flege et al., 1995). Taken together, researchers have reported mixed results. Whereas most studies (Elliot, 1995; Moyer, 2007; Shively, 2008) found a relationship between L2 speakers’ positive attitudes toward L2 pronunciation and higher pronunciation accuracy, other studies did not find such relations (Flege et al., 1995). However, these studies have been conducted in English as a Second Language (ESL) contexts or with L2 speakers of Spanish in the United States and to our knowledge, no research has to date focused on how EFL learners’ attitudes toward L2 pronunciation learning are related to their speech performance.

In sum, due to conflicting findings about the relationship between affective factors and L2 pronunciation attainment, the current study further examines whether L2 speakers’ attitudes to pronunciation are related to their accentedness. Previous research has shown a possible link between L2 speakers’ attitudes toward pronunciation learning and their pronunciation accuracy in ESL settings (e.g., Elliot, 1995). Although some studies examined EFL learners’ attitudes (e.g., Sardegna et al., 2018; Tokumoto & Shibata, 2011), how they were related to actual performance was not investigated. Because they may be closely linked to motivation and experience (Huensch & Thompson, 2017) and influence approaches to learning L2 pronunciation (Sardegna et al., 2018), attitudes may deserve attention when exploring factors that potentially contribute to L2 pronunciation attainment. Additionally, both EFL learners and teachers, especially L1 Japanese speakers, may strive to attain nativelike pronunciation while receiving the minimum L2 input. Therefore, investigating accentedness with EFL learners from relatively homogenous backgrounds (e.g., L1, chronological age, age of learning, L2 experience) would help us understanding how individual differences may be linked to variance in performance. Using a subset of data from a larger study (Tsunemoto & Isaacs, 2020), this exploratory study addresses the following two research questions:

What factors underlie Japanese EFL learners’ attitudes toward English pronunciation?

What is the relationship between their attitudes toward English pronunciation and their perceived accentedness?

Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that EFL learners may overall show positive attitudes toward L2 pronunciation learning including the importance of L2 pronunciation and a desire to attain nativelike pronunciation. Additionally, learners with more positive attitudes should receive better accentedness scores.

2 Method

2.1 Participants

2.1.1 EFL learners

The participants were 62 English L2 secondary school students (44 boys, 18 girls) in urban schools in Japan. They were all L1 speakers of Japanese and ranged in age from 16 to 18 years, with a mean age of 16.4 (SD = 0.6). The EFL learners had started learning English around the age of 10.6 years (SD = 3.1), and none had stayed longer than 30 days in an English-speaking country. As a measure of general L2 proficiency, the EFL learners reported their most recent EIKEN test, which includes paper-based reading, listening, and writing sections, along with an oral interview. The majority of the EFL learners (78%) scored at levels equivalent to A2 to B1 in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), while the remainder were B2 (4%) and A1 (18%) at CEFR levels (Eiken Foundation of Japan, 2017).

2.1.2 Raters

The raters were 16 adults (14 women) with normal hearing who were studying education or applied linguistics degrees at an English-medium university in Montreal. There were an equal number of English L1 and L2 speakers, and the English L2 speakers reported L1 backgrounds of Russian, Persian, Portuguese (n = 2 each), Chinese, and Vietnamese (n = 1 each). The raters had a mean age of 31.5 years (SD = 6.9) and reported a mean of 5.7 years (SD = 3.7) prior teaching experience. They reported using English predominantly in their daily lives for both speaking (M = 74.4%) and listening (M = 80.0%). Although they had prior experience with phonology (75% had taken a phonology course) and a great deal of familiarity with general L2 accented English (M = 78.8%), the raters had never lived in Japan, did not have daily contact with Japanese speakers (M = 9.4%), and were not highly familiar with Japanese-accented English (M = 26.7%).

2.2 Materials

2.2.1 Speaking task

Although picture description tasks have been extensively used, read-aloud tasks can be more suitable to assess L2 pronunciation because they control for lexical and grammatical accuracy (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010). Therefore, a short text (69 words) from the Speech Accent Archive (Weinberger, 2015) was used to elicit a 30-second speech sample from each participant (Appendix 1). This text was selected because it contains segmental and prosodic features shown to be problematic for English L2 speakers. To reduce potential problems caused by unfamiliar vocabulary, 78% of the words in the text appear on the most frequent 1000-word list (Cobb, n.d.; Heatley, Nation, & Coxhead, 2002). Nevertheless, pilot testing revealed that some words were unfamiliar to Japanese secondary students (e.g., slabs, scoop). Providing planning time (1 min) and opportunities to ask clarification questions ensured that the EFL learners understood and could articulate the new words.

2.2.2 Questionnaire

A 10-item Likert-scale questionnaire (1 = not true at all, 6 = extremely true) was compiled by the first researcher to elicit the EFL learners’ attitudes toward English pronunciation by taking eight items from instruments used in prior research (Dörnyei & Taguchi, 2010; Tokumoto & Shibata, 2011; Uchida & Sugimoto, 2019) and creating two original items. The items targeted the importance of English pronunciation, desire to have a native English accent, enjoyment of English music and rhythm, perceived accent, perceived comprehensibility, and confidence. All the questions were written in Japanese to ensure the EFL learners understood them clearly. The questionnaire items were reviewed by two Japanese teachers of English for translation accuracy and readability for Japanese EFL learners and then pilot tested with Japanese EFL learners. No major changes were needed—the final questionnaire is provided in Appendix 2.

2.3 Procedure

After completing the consent and biographical information forms during a regularly scheduled EFL class, each EFL learner scheduled an individual session with the first researcher (15 min), which was held in the school’s study room. The EFL learners were given the script and had one minute to read it silently. After the planning time, they had a chance to ask questions about any problematic words in the passage. The speech samples were recorded via a Plantronics Audio 655 DSP headset connected to a laptop and saved as audio files (16.0 kHz, 16-bit). The mean speaking time to read the text aloud was 32.7 seconds (SD = 6.23). After excluding initial pauses or hesitations and normalizing for peak intensity, the speech samples were saved separately as WAV files for the rating sessions.

Each rater scheduled an individual rating session with the first researcher or a research assistant (60 min) held in a research office at their university. The raters first completed an online background questionnaire. Next, they were provided with a 9-point Likert-type scale (1 = heavily accented, 9 = not accented at all) and the definition of accentedness used in the current study, which was the degree to which Japanese influenced the learners’ English pronunciation. After reviewing the definition and rating scale with the researchers, the raters practiced rating the accentedness of three EFL learners not included in the current data set. Once they were comfortable with the rating task, the raters listened to the speech samples in a pseudo-randomized order using a headset connected to a laptop computer. The raters listened to an entire speech sample (duration 22–51 sec) one time only and then assigned an accentedness rating. The raters worked through all 62 speech samples at their own pace.

3 Results

The first research question asked what factors underlie Japanese EFL learners’ attitudes toward English pronunciation. To identify learners’ attitudes, an exploratory factor analysis was used to identify latent variables (Henson & Roberts, 2006) underlying the questionnaire items. The data were not normally distributed, so the principal axis factors extraction was conducted using the oblique (Promax) method for rotating the data (Field, 2018; Osborne, Costello, & Kellow, 2008). Because a threshold of .40 was required for factor loading (Field, 2018; Loewen & Gonulal, 2015), two items about their attitudes toward accents (Q5, Q6) that failed to reach the threshold were removed from the analysis. The remaining eight items met the remaining criteria (Field, 2018) for factor analysis: Their residuals were greater than .05, which accounted for 14% which was less than 50%; all the measures of sampling adequacy in an anti-image correlation exceeded .53, which was greater than .50; communalities of the items were .22 < h² < .80, which were greater than .16; and the R-matrix showed the determinant was .11, which was greater than .0001. These preliminary analyses suggest there is no issue with multicollinearity across items.

Based on the Kaiser criterion (Eigenvalues > 1.00) and an inspection of a scree plot, three factors were revealed that accounted for 69.2% of the total variance. The factorability of the data set was validated by Bartlett’s test of sphericity: χ²(28) = 128.39, p = .001. Despite the relatively small sample size, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was .61, which exceeded the threshold of .50 (Field, 2018). All the variables of the three factors had factor loadings greater than .40 and each factor had at least a minimum of two variables (Henson & Roberts, 2006). The factor loadings after rotation are provided in Table 1. Based on the strongest loadings (Loewen & Gonulal, 2015), each factor was labelled: Factor 1 was pronunciation importance, Factor 2 was interest in English sounds, and Factor 3 was pronunciation confidence. Thus, the findings for the first research question indicate that three factors accounted for the participants’ attitudes to pronunciation.

Table 1.

Three-Factor Solution for Attitudes toward English Pronunciation (N = 62).

Statement	Factor 1	Factor 2	Factor 3	M	SD
Factor 1: Pronunciation importance (α = .71)
1. English pronunciation is important for learning English at school.	0.89	−0.22	0.08	5.36	1.02
3. I would like to sound like native speakers of English.	0.70	0.36	0.04	5.06	1.36
2. English pronunciation is important to communicate with foreign people.	0.49	0.22	−0.29	5.39	1.04
Factor 2: Interest in English sounds (α = .69)
8. I like the rhythm of English.	−0.07	0.80	0.03	3.63	1.51
9. I like the music of English-speaking countries.	0.09	0.72	−0.10	4.31	1.56
10. When I speak English, I try to imitate an ideal pronunciation model to me.	−0.16	0.45	0.24	2.49	1.44
Factor 3: Pronunciation confidence (α = .58)
4. I am confident in my English pronunciation.	0.09	−0.03	0.92	2.43	1.12
7. Native speakers can easily understand my accented English.	−0.09	0.04	0.43	2.97	1.29
Eigenvalues	2.33	2.14	1.07
% of variance	29.13	26.71	13.41

α: Cronbach’s alpha.

Factor loadings over 0.40 appear in bold.

The second research question asked whether there was a relationship between the EFL learners’ pronunciation attitudes and their accentedness ratings. First, the internal consistency of the 16 raters’ scores was checked using Cronbach’s alpha, which was .91. As the internal consistency exceeded the suggested threshold of .70 to .80 (Larson-Hall, 2016), the raters’ scores were pooled and averaged to derive a single accentedness score. The EFL learners’ accentedness scores ranged from 2.6 to 6.8 (out of 9), with a mean score of 4.2 (SD = .8). To explore the relationship between pronunciation attitudes and accentedness, the Anderson-Rubin method was used to obtain noncorrelated factor scores (Field, 2018). Due to the lack of normality in the data, Spearman correlations were used. The correlation results revealed that pronunciation confidence had a significant, positive relationship with accentedness, r_s(62) = .31, p = .01. In other words, EFL learners who rated their confidence highly were rated as having less accented pronunciation. However, there were no significant relationships between accentedness scores and pronunciation importance, r_s(62) = .15, p = .23, or interest in English sounds, r_s(62) = .17, p = .19. Thus, only the EFL learners’ pronunciation confidence was associated with the accentedness ratings.

4 Discussion

This study explored the relationship between Japanese EFL learners’ attitudes toward English pronunciation and their accentedness. Factor analysis of the attitudes questionnaire revealed three factors: pronunciation importance, interest in English sounds, and pronunciation confidence. Pronunciation importance can correspond to the concerns for pronunciation (Elliot, 1995; Purcell & Suter, 1980; Suter, 1976), interest in L2 sounds could be treated as a dimension of a positive attitude toward the target language, and pronunciation confidence is in line with self-perceived confidence in L2 performance (Moyer, 2007).

Having identified the underling factors, the results for the second research question indicated that only pronunciation confidence was significantly related to the EFL learners’ accentedness ratings. The findings confirm prior studies that reported that L2 speakers who are confident in their L2 speaking skills are perceived as less accented (Moyer, 2007). The relationship between self-confidence and L2 competence has been extensively examined by researchers in motivational studies (e.g., Clément & Kruidenier, 1985; Clément, Dörnyei, & Noels, 1994). In relation to language anxiety, these trends that L2 learners who are confident in their skills perform better than peers can be found not only in relation overall L2 proficiency (Pae, 2008) but also for other L2 specific skills such as L2 listening abilities (Zhang, 2013). As for L2 pronunciation specifically, Smit (2002) found those who were more confident about learning L2 pronunciation received better overall pronunciation achievement scores from native speakers. Also, how less anxious (i.e., confident) Japanese EFL learners were about L2 learning was related to how comprehensible they were and how much they improved over a three-month period (Saito et al., 2018). Further investigation is necessary to understand what might underlie the relationship between self-confidence and L2 pronunciation. For example, L2 speakers may gain self-confidence through their L2 experience (Uchida & Sugimoto, 2019) while high anxiety may hinder their development (Saito et al., 2018: Smit, 2002). Nevertheless, it seems reasonable that L2 speakers’ performance is related to their self-perceived confidence level.

However, the correlation results failed to confirm the positive relationship between accentedness and pronunciation importance (Elliot, 1995; Suter, 1976) or positive attitudes toward the target language (Moyer, 2007). Previous research has shown that L2 speakers who valued pronunciation improvement had more experience in L2 learning (Huensch & Thompson, 2017; Uchida & Sugimoto, 2019). Considering the link between experience and performance, one might expect pronunciation importance to be related to pronunciation accuracy. A possible reason for the discrepancy is that most EFL learners in the current study considered English pronunciation to be important (5.27 out of 6 on average), regardless of how they were judged by listeners. Also, our finding is in line with previous study that EFL learners’ accentedness was not related to how much they put the importance on accurate and clear pronunciation and speaking without accent (Saito et al., 2017). Hence, having high concerns for pronunciation is no guarantee that an L2 speaker will have better performance in the short term, although it may be related to attainment over a longer-time period (Nagle, 2018).

In sum, this study added an empirical evidence for a positive relationship between L2 speakers’ self-confidence and their L2 pronunciation attainment in an EFL context. In line with previous research conducted in Japan (Tokumoto & Shibata, 2011; Uchida & Sugimoto, 2019), our participants overall showed a strong desire to attain nativelike pronunciation (5.06 out of 6, on average). Considering the fact that EFL learners have minimal L2 input and interaction with target language speakers (e.g., Larson-Hall, 2008; Saito et al., 2018), EFL learners may benefit from gaining confidence in their pronunciation to be perceived as more nativelike by listeners. Learners may increase their self-confidence by engaging in activities such as using a self-assessment tool to practice pronunciation (e.g., Lappin-Fortin & Rye, 2014).

However, this exploratory study has several limitations that influence its generalizability. First, the sample size of both EFL learners and raters was relatively small. As the raters’ background could affect L2 pronunciation ratings (e.g., Winke, Gass, & Myford, 2013), future research should examine whether recruiting raters from diverse language backgrounds would still yield the significant pronunciation attitudes and confidence relationship. Second, the questionnaire had relatively low internal consistency across items (α = .58–.71) and a limited number of items per factor. Future research should include a greater number of items on the questionnaire, which may reveal additional latent variables. At the same time, although our finding captured a possible link between self-confidence and pronunciation attainment, because attitudinal factors may develop over time according to L2 speakers’ experience, it is crucial to explore how L2 speakers’ attitudes and performance change over time. Third, future studies should explore EFL learners’ performance in terms of not only accentedness but also comprehensibility. Because our target EFL learners are strongly inclined toward nativelike pronunciation, it was reasonable to examine their pronunciation accuracy. However, it is important to examine links between attitudes and comprehensibility because nonnative accent does not necessarily cause issues in understanding L2 speech (Munro & Derwing, 1995). Another important issue is the speech elicitation task, which was a read-aloud task that controlled for variance in grammar and vocabularies. Read-aloud tasks are popularly used in a Japanese EFL context (Uchida & Sugimoto, 2018), with teachers asking students to read aloud texts in the classrooms or students using read-aloud passages at home for self-studying purposes. However, whether their performance in a controlled task could be transferred to extemporaneous speech should be further examined. Finally, because other individual characteristics such as L2 use outside the classroom, aptitude, and length of L2 learning (e.g., Piske, MacKay, & Flege, 2001) may also help explain what learner factors are associated with accentedness, our future studies aim to further examine the relationships between different individual differences and L2 pronunciation attainment.

Footnotes

Appendix 1

Appendix 2 Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Talia Isaacs in developing materials which later fed into the current study. We also thank Pakize Uludag, who helped with data collection.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was funded by a grant awarded to the second author from the Canada Research Chairs program (950-231304).

ORCID iD

Aki Tsunemoto

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