Motivation,Anxiety,and Enjoyment in L2 Pronunciation: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Echoing recent calls for exploring skill-specific individual-difference factors, this two-part study investigated the predictive effect of pronunciation anxiety, enjoyment, and motivation on Chinese university English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners’ global second-language (L2) speech learning. Study 1 cross-sectionally investigated the predictive effects of emotional and motivational factors on 82 participants’ comprehensibility and accentedness attainment based on expert raters’ evaluation of speech samples elicited from a long-turn monologic task. Statistical results found that comprehensibility was unrelated to participants’ emotions and motivation, while pronunciation anxiety negatively predicted accentedness. Study 2 explored 65 participants’ speech development following an 8-week explicit pronunciation instruction. Results revealed that participants developed both accentedness and comprehensibility after pronunciation instruction, regardless of their different emotional and motivational traits. Theoretical insights into revising speech acquisition models and pedagogical implications for pronunciation teaching were discussed.

Keywords

L2 pronunciation positive psychology motivation emotion pronunciation instruction

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