Students’ Attitudes Towards Foreign Accents: General Motivation, the Attainability of Native-Like Pronunciation, and Identity Issues

Abstract

The study examined attitudes of 372 first-year bachelor Italian university students towards various aspects of foreign-accented speech. The data showed that the respondents have generally positive attitudes towards pronunciation teaching, while the most divisive statements regarded the relative importance of studying L2 phonetics and the sufficiency of comprehensibility in L2 communication. Correlations between these attitudes and the students’ biographical data were discussed. The predictor that revealed significant effects most frequently was the students’ extrinsic/intrinsic motivation in choosing foreign languages as their major.