İngilizce'nin yabancı dil olarak öğrenildiği ortamlarda, ana-dili İngilizce olmayan kişilerin kültürel kimliği ve telaffuzu arasındaki ilişki

Many factors are known to influence the pronunciation of English by speakersof other languages, including: the speaker?s L1, age of beginning English, length ofstudy, gender, motivation, aptitude, and personality. Other socio-cultural factors, suchas ethnic group affiliation and desire of the speaker to identify themselves throughtheir accent are also believed to influence a speaker?s pronunciation. However, thereis at present a lack of research into the relationship between the degree of a speaker?sself-identification with their own culture and that speaker?s pronunciation accuracy inan EFL context.This study addresses the following two questions: 1) What are therelationships among cultural identity, the degree of accentedness, and attitudes towardpronunciation of non-native speakers of English in an EFL context? and 2) What arethe attitudes of non-native speakers of English in an EFL context toward theirpronunciation of English? The participants of the study were advanced Turkishspeakers of English at two English-medium universities in Ankara, Turkey. Theparticipants responded to a questionnaire about cultural identity, attitudes towardpronunciation, and language background. Then a selection of participants who hadcompleted the questionnaire provided a pronunciation sample based on three tasks,which were then scored for degree of accent by five native speakers of English. Thequestionnaire, and the pronunciation ratings provided by the native speaker judgeswere analyzed for reliability. The language background information factors andattitude ratings were compared individually with the identity and pronunciation scoresto determine which factors were related to each. It was found that age of beginningEnglish study and residence of three or more months abroad were significantly relatedto both the identity and pronunciation scores; therefore, these factors were controlledfor in the partial correlation analysis of the relationship between cultural identity andpronunciation.The results of the study did not reveal a direct relationship between culturalidentity and degree of accentedness. Moreover, the qualitative data revealed that themajority of participants did not believe that their pronunciation was related to theircultural identity. However, the data did reveal a significant relationship betweencultural identity and how important native-like pronunciation of English wasperceived to be. For this reason, it is felt that more research into the relationshipsbetween cultural identity, pronunciation attainment and attitudes toward native-likepronunciation is needed. It can be concluded, based on the attitudes expressed by theparticipants, that native-like pronunciation of English should not be ruled out as agoal for learners, especially in that most did not feel that this would be a threat to theircultural identity. Individual preferences and goals need to be taken into considerationin pronunciation instruction, but it should by no means be neglected on the basis ofthe claim that trying to change pronunciation is interfering with identity.Key words: pronunciation ability, cultural identity, attitudes to pronunciation