Pronunciation Learning Attitudes: The Case of EFL Undergraduate Students in Indonesia

A pronunciation-learning attitude is essential to help students improve their pronunciation proficiency. It is problematic when students do not care about learning proper pronunciation in the process of teaching and learning. Several studies have investigated EFL students’ perceptions toward attitudes of pronunciation learning. However, little research focused on the role of gender on students’ attitudes in this context. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate students’ attitudes toward English pronunciation learning related to gender. An explanatory sequential mixed-method approach, integrating questionnaires of Gardner 1985’s Attitude Motivation of Test Battery (AMTB) and Elliott 1995’s Pronunciation Attitude Inventory (PAI) and interviews, was employed in this study. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were used to analyse quantitative data gathered from 151 students. For qualitative data, the semi-structured interview transcripts of eighteen participants were analysed using thematic analysis. The questionnaires reveal that the students had positive pronunciation learning attitudes, and no significant


INTRODUCTION
Attitude is identified as an individual positive and negative response toward something (Ajzen, 2001;Zulfikar et al., 2019), which can be observed from behaviour (Saibi et al., 2019).It is an external factor that strongly influences the learners' pronunciation (Bohner & Wanke, 2002;Gao & Hanna, 2016;Gilakjani, 2016) to be native-like (McKenzie, 2008).Jenkins (2002) argued that English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL) learners should adapt native speakers' speech to have understandable pronunciation.Students with attitudes of proper pronunciation are easily understood by other people when communicating in English (Marzá, 2014) compared to students with negative attitude (Zhou, 2019).Thus, learning attitude and accuracy are correlated for EFL learners in the process of teaching and learning (Alonso-Herrero & Herrarte, 2019).
Specifically, AlMansour (2016) viewed that attitude toward pronunciation learning refers to culture, past experiences, assumptions, or beliefs about correct phonetic acceleration.It plays an important role in English pronunciation learning and has been a concern of second language (L2) and foreign language researchers (Almaqrn & Alshabeb, 2017).Therefore, the PLA is the basis for recognizing a correct English phonetic (Steed & Cantero, 2014), which can help learners understand and practice proper pronunciation (Sardegna et al., 2018).When students have a positive attitude toward the English language (FL) or L2, they will have the imagination to pronounce the language like native speakers.In developing pronunciation proficiency and a positive attitude, students try to find appropriate strategies to attain their objectives (Sardegna et al., 2018) by prioritizing English pronunciation akin to native speakers (Bresnahan et al., 2002) such as paying attention to others in pronouncing the language phonetics (Tokumoto & Shibata, 2011).This behavioural attitude component contributes to pronunciation learning and leads the students toward sounding like native speakers of English (Gao & Hanna, 2016;Gilakjani, 2016;Monfared, 2019).
Previous studies have been conducted to explore the pronunciation learning attitude (PLA) of EFL learners.A study carried out by Bresnahan et al. (2002) investigated the attitudes of 311 participants identified as American ethnic.The study yielded that the students had positive attitudes toward American English.Kang (2010) investigated the attitudes of 64 Mandarin students, 64 Koreans, and 42 Japanese toward English learning pronunciation and accent varieties in New Zealand and North America.The research reveals that most students positively view attitudes toward pronunciation learning, recognizing its capacity to enhance their English-speaking confidence.
Moreover, Tokumoto and Shibata (2011) noted that most Japanese and more than 50 percent of Korean students have strong attitudes toward native-like pronunciation compared to Malaysian students.A study carried out by Chan (2016) found that Cantonese-speaking students strongly believed in the attitude of English pronunciation accent.Gao and Hanna (2016) pointed out that students' positive attitudes toward pronunciation can be established by providing an understanding of its importance and familiarity with software that can support learning.An investigation of Czech EFL learners' attitudes towards accents of English conducted by Brabcová and Skarnitzl (2018) concluded that students are satisfied with learning English when they judge that their pronunciation proficiency is close to that of native speakers.Ghounane (2019) also revealed that the students had positive pronunciation learning attitudes as a result of using MALL as a learning media, based on his inspection.The correlation study carried out by Bin-Hady and Hazaea (2020) reported that there was a correlation between attitude toward flipped learning and pronunciation proficiency.In addition, Tsunemoto and McDonough (2021), who focused their research on the relationship between pronunciation learning attitude and accent perception, showed that the interest in native-like is very important and can support EFL learners' pronunciation confidence.

Research Design
The study employed an explanatory sequential mixed method approach to investigate EFL learners' attitudes toward pronunciation learning across three universities in Indonesia.A mixed method design was employed in order for the researchers to use two data types, i.e., quantitative and qualitative data, to answer the research questions (Lan & Hew, 2020).The study was carried out in two phases: in the first stage, the quantitative method was employed to study if there were differences in attitudes among the students.In this stage, the data were collected using a survey instrument and were analysed quantitatively using statistical analysis.Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were combined to collect and analyse data for better understanding (Creswell, 2012).

Participants
A total of 151 students, comprising 38 males and 113 females ranging between 19 and 20 years of age from three higher education in Sumatra, Indonesia, participated in the quantitative data collection stage.Although we initially targeted all students (171) as the sample size, 20 students abstained from responding to the online questionnaire.The participants were spread over seven English department classes and had varied pronunciation proficiency.Of 151 participants, eighteen students (i.e., seven males and eleven females) were purposively selected as the participants in the interviews.They were selected as the participants based on their willingness to be interviewed in November 2021.The name of participants was masked for privacy, such as S1, S2, S3, and so forth.

Instrument
As a mixed-method study, two data collection methods were employed to collect the required data, including questionnaires and interviews.Fifteen items were used to measure the students' attitude toward English pronunciation learning; six items (items 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11) were adapted from Gardner's (1985) Attitude and Motivation of Test Battery (AMTB), and nine items (item 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15) were from Elliott's (1995) Pronunciation Attitude Inventory (PAI).The 15 items were developed with the use of a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree), 2 (Disagree), 3 (Neutral), 4 (Agree), and 5 (Strongly Agree) to which the participants might respond one of the five options.The items were carefully translated into Indonesia, proofread, and assessed for face and content validity by two lecturers with English doctoral degrees who were experts in English language teaching.Then, the translated items were piloted to 45 different students who maintained the same level and characteristics as the participants of the study.Piloting the items is very important for revision requirements (Sbaihat et al., 2018).
The reliability analysis of the piloted data was performed using SPSS 23 and showed that Cronbach's alpha of the fifteen items was 0.94, which means that the scale has high internal consistency.Thus, all the items were appropriate for measuring the pronunciation learning attitude of Indonesian EFL learners.In addition to the questionnaire, semi-structured interviews were used in the qualitative method stage, aiming to explore the reasons that emerged from the participants about the attitude toward learning pronunciation.This qualitative research instrument helped the researchers gain further information related to topic being investigated (Ambele & Boonsuk, 2021).In other words, the results of the quantitative data analysis were used to plan the follow-up qualitative data collection (Mahmood et al., 2018).

Data Collection
The initial contact with the department heads of English at three higher education institutions was made through email to get their approval to conduct our research.Having received the approval, the researchers contacted the lecturers whose students were involved in the research to assist us in forwarding the links to the electronic version of the questionnaires to the students.All the lecturers contacted were willing to forward the questionnaire to the students through their WhatsApp class group.Before completing the questionnaire, students were informed to respond to the questionnaire item honestly, as their participants in the study would not affect their scores in the classroom.
For the qualitative data, the students who were selected for the interviews based on their availability and research sampling criteria were contacted by telephone to organize an online interview schedule.It is important to reach an agreement that is related to their willingness, interview tools, and schedule.In doing so, a Zoom meeting was offered as the medium of the interview, and the students were allowed to choose the appropriate time.After the agreement was met, consent forms were sent to each interviewee through email as evidence that they voluntarily participated in the interviews and audio recording.In the next two days, a Zoom meeting link was sent to each interviewee using WhatsApp five minutes before the interview began, similar to what Octaberlina and Muslimin (2021) did in collecting their research data during the COVID-19.The selected interviewees were interviewed for 45 and 60 minutes on different days twice over three months, from August to November 2021.Administering more than one interview is a way to allow participants to clarify the results of their previous interviews (Bolderston, 2012).Using Google Forms and Zoom meeting links as the media for collecting data was due to the consideration of the COVID-19 outbreak.During the pandemic, the government prohibited everyone from having in-person interactions.In interviewing the students, open-ended and follow-up questions were implemented by asking the students demographic information followed by specific questions based on research aspects, including (1) the importance of pronunciation class, i.e., "How important is pronunciation learning for you, (2) learning pronunciation for communication needs, i.e., "What is the role of pronunciation learning in communication?" (3) Learning pronunciation for the native accent, i.e., "How important is the English accent native-like for you?".

Data Analysis
Descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23 were used to analyse the results of the questionnaires.The percentage of students' responses was calculated through descriptive statistics to describe the perception of the importance of learning pronunciation, learning pronunciation for communication needs, and pronunciation learning for native accents.The differences in perceptions between females and males were examined using the independent sample t-test for normally distributed data, and Mann-Whitney U tests for the non-normally distributed data.All the data were then displayed in a table.The interview transcript was analysed using thematic analysis as it can help researchers justify and review the point of data for pattern identification (Rawat, 2021) and shorten a set of big important data (King, 2004).Therefore, six stages of the thematic analysis described in Braun and Clarke (2006) were implemented for the qualitative phase of this study: familiarization with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and producing the report.It began with reading and re-reading the first transcript several times to identify phrases and sentences related to students' attitudes T. Indrayadi, H. Mulyono, S. K. Ningsih & A. Mukminin, Pronunciation learning attitudes: The case of EFL undergraduate students in Indonesia | 700 toward pronunciation learning.The rest of the interviews were similarly processed and then categorized into themes.To ensure the trustworthiness of the qualitative data analysis, member checking was applied by allowing the participants to check the interview transcriptions.It was taken as a step to ensure that the transcriptions accurately represented the participants' views.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This section presents and discusses the result of the quantitative and qualitative analyses of students' pronunciation learning attitude dimensions, namely the importance of learning pronunciation, learning pronunciation for communication needs, and pronunciation learning for native accents.Each aspect of the research was analysed, and the results are presented separately.

The Attitudes of Indonesian Undergraduate Students toward
Pronunciation Learning

Importance of learning pronunciation
The results of the data analysis reveal that students had a positive attitude toward the importance of pronunciation role in learning English, which can be seen in Table 1.Table 1 shows the percentage of students who responded to each item in the questionnaire.As illustrated in Table 1, most participants agree and strongly agree with all items in the questionnaire.Among all items, the third item received more positive responses, i.e. 84%.This suggests that the majority of the students considered that learning English pronunciation is very useful.Meanwhile, the items which received the least positive response was the seventh item, i.e. 62%, and many students chose "neutral" to this item.This suggests that many students were unsure that proper pronunciation should be prioritized when their lecturers taught pronunciation.
The students' responses were then elaborated with the evidence from follow-up interviews.This tool of data collection was administered to each participant to gather the students' further perception of pronunciation learning attitudes.It was used to validate the results of the quantitative phase.The qualitative data show a similar result to the descriptive quantitative result.The students perceived pronunciation learning as very important in learning English because it can help them pronounce words correctly.
(1) Learning pronunciation is very important for me.By learning pronunciation, I can pronounce English phonetics which have a different phonological sound system to Indonesian as my first language.(S5).
(2) I can pronounce diphthongs, triphthongs, semivowels, and consonants correctly through pronunciation learning, and it also helps me to understand what other people say.(S15).
Another 30%, however, believed that pronunciation learning made them confident with the accuracy of their pronunciation.
(3) Having proper pronunciation makes me believe that other people understand me.(S3l).
As shown in the excerpt above, the students mentioned that having a positive attitude toward pronunciation learning could help them pronounce English correctly.The results of this study are consistent with Savitri and Andrianto (2021).Most of the participants in their research positively responded to pronunciation learning because learning pronunciation can help them improve their English pronunciation.The importance of pronunciation learning was also revealed by Zhou (2019).Accordingly, Guinn-Collins (2011) investigated the relationship between motivation and pronunciation of English-speaking students who studied Japanese for sixteen years at a Pacific Northwest university.A correlation design was used in his study by involving ten volunteers, which involved senior and graduate-level students from Japanese speaking and listening classes.The study results showed that the positive attitude and intrinsic motivation of students towards the target language learning had a very close relationship with the perfection of Japanese pronunciation.
The learners can achieve proper pronunciation objectives by being seriously involved in the pronunciation learning class (Suzukida, 2021) and taking part in special pronunciation training to be able to pronounce English phonetics correctly (Farrah & Halahlah, 2020).When students consider that English is important in facilitating their success both academically and professionally, they will be interested in learning how to pronounce English like a native speaker (Bresnahan et al., 2002).In other words, the awareness of the target language's phonological system strongly influences the accuracy of learners' pronunciation (Sinha et al., 2009).The more students realize the important role of pronunciation in learning English, the more they will have accurate pronunciation (Indrayadi et al., 2021).This was evident in the study conducted by Huensch and Thompson (2017) on the relationship between FL students' attitudes toward pronunciation performance and L2 motivation among 195 FL students.The study adopted online survey research by collecting data from the participants who speak Spanish, American Sign Language (ASL), Bengali, Cantonese, Haitian Creole, Persian, and Tamil as their native languages.It was found that there is a relationship between students' positive perceptions and improved pronunciation.

Learning pronunciation for communication needs
Table 2 displays the percentage of learning pronunciation for communication needs on each scale.As seen in Table 2, the student's responses are in the "strongly agree" and "agree" categories.Most students believed that they could improve their pronunciation by using English often.Meanwhile, more than half of the students were unsure whether they should practice English pronunciation instead of using Indonesian.In the interview, the majority of the interviewees stated that correct pronunciation was helpful for communication because it can help them to reduce mispronunciation of English words.
(4) Learning pronunciation helps me communicate with classmates and lecturers and even minimize my pronunciation mistakes.(S30).
Eight students perceived that correct pronunciation helps others understand what they say when using English.The excerpt above highlights that pronunciation class is important in establishing proper pronunciation for communication needs because it helps the interlocutor easily understand their speech.This is in line with that of Almaqrn and Alshabeb (2017), who found that English department students at Imam University focused on proper pronunciation in learning English.Evidence of proper pronunciation rules in communication was also revealed by Sardegna et al. (2018), who found that Korean students avoided making pronunciation mistakes when speaking to others in English.Likewise, the study conducted by Zhou (2019) examined the influence of motivation on attitude toward English pronunciation.He adopted a survey design using questionnaires to collect data from 124 students at a public university in the Southeastern U.S., who speak Mandarin and Spanish as their L1.The study showed that most of the students were self-motivated to learn English for communication purposes.This was proven by mean scores of F2 and F3 at 4.37 and 4.09, respectively, by 124 students of Mandarin and Spanish who study in a public university in the Southeastern U.S.
EFL learners with good knowledge of English phonology will be able to pronounce English phonemes correctly (Saito et al., 2019) and use phonetic knowledge to converse with English speakers (Farrah & Halahlah, 2020).It also helps learners achieve comprehensibility in others' utterances (Marzá, 2014).Thus, phonetic knowledge is considered important for EFL learners to acquire when they want to have sufficient pronunciation (Singh, 2017).

Pronunciation learning for native accent
Regarding the need for pronunciation learning for native accents, many students agree with the statements in the questionnaire.The percentage of students who strongly agreed was less than 20% for the majority of the items.Table 3 shows that item 4 received more positive responses, i.e. 79%.This result shows that students believed that they could improve their pronunciation if they could take a specific course to improve their pronunciation.Furthermore, not many students agreed that they needed to sound like a native speaker (item 1).However, the result of the interview found that most of the students needed to have pronunciation like native English when learning English.This proficiency can help them make understandable utterances when making conversations.For example: (6) I think the success of learning English for EFL learners is being able to pronounce phonemes like a native speaker.This ability makes me confident when making conversations in English with my classmates and lecturers.(S25) (7) I believe that having the ability to pronounce phonemes like an English native speaker will make me speak smoothly in conversation.Therefore, I pay more attention to my lecturers' pronunciation in the process of teaching and learning.(S14) Other students stated that by learning pronunciation, they can have proper pronunciation.For example: (8) I am sure, the pronunciation class helps me pronounce English letters correctly.I can distinguish English phonemes properly.(S21) Based on excerpt (8) above, the students strongly believed in native English-like accents to support their English conversation.They highlighted the vital rule of English pronunciation accent in making other people understand them in conversation.These findings were corroborated by previous studies in non-English-speaking countries (e.g., Bøhn & Hansen, 2017;Bresnahan et al., 2002;Carrie, 2017;Phusit & Suksiripakonchai, 2018).They found that the students in their study responded to the English accent positively to achieve proper English pronunciation.Accent like English native speakers, was a learning goal for EFL learners (Bøhn & Hansen, 2017).In other words, they must be able to adapt to the English phonemic rules they are studying if they want to have native English-like English pronunciation (Indrayanti et al., 2010).
Awareness of the target language's phonological system strongly influences the learners' accurate pronunciation (Sinha et al., 2009).The more students realize the important role of pronunciation in learning English, the more they will have accurate pronunciation (Indrayadi et al., 2021).Through the awareness of English-like pronunciation, the students can not only speak in English but also pronounce English phonetics correctly, which can be understood by the interlocutor (Istiqomah et al., 2021).A positive attitude towards learning pronunciation will help students succeed in learning the language (Huensch & Thompson, 2017).In contrast, a negative attitude toward transferring from their mother tongue is disadvantageous to their English communication (Çakır & Baytar, 2014).Therefore, EFL/English as a second language (ESL) learners must have the target to become like native English speakers (Bøhn & Hansen, 2017).

Differences in Attitudes towards Pronunciation Learning Concerning Gender
The findings of this study also indicate that there was no significant difference between the level of students' pronunciation learning attitudes concerning gender based on the analysis of the independent sample t-test and the Mann-Whitney U test.The independent sample t-test was used to analyse the importance of pronunciation learning and pronunciation learning for native accents.The importance of pronunciation learning attitude level of male students (M=28.2895N=38), female students (M=27.56,N=113), t=.66, sig.=.62 (p˃.05), and the pronunciation learning for native accent level of male students (M=15.13,N=38) and female counterparts (M=14.59,N=113), t=.89, sig.=.52 (p˃.05).While the Mann-Whitney U test analysis is for learning pronunciation for communication needs, in which male (M rank=80.07,N=38) and female students (M rank=74.63,N=113), z=-.67, sig.=.50 (p˃.05).The analysis of three indicators showed that the pronunciation learning attitude level of the males was higher than that of females, as seen in Table 4, Table 5, and Table 6.The findings related to gender comparison aligns with Dewaele and McCloskey (2014), who pointed out that males have higher attitudes toward foreign accents than females.However, it contradicts Alonso-Herrero and Herrarte (2019) who found that female students had a more positive attitude toward pronunciation learning than males.Sardegna et al. (2018) conducted research on 704 EFL students from urban cities in South Korea entitled "Self-efficacy, attitudes, and choice of strategies for English pronunciation learning," revealing that both males and females have similar pronunciation learning attitudes.Comparing students' attitudes based on gender can be a basis for English lecturers to use the right teaching strategy in pronunciation class.

CONCLUSION
This study explores EFL learners' attitudes toward English pronunciation learning Indonesian students.The findings of the study show that the students had a positive perception toward the importance of learning pronunciation, learning pronunciation for communication needs, and pronunciation learning for native accents.The students explained that positive attitudes are useful for creating proper pronunciation, making the interlocutor understand us easily when communicating in English, and pronunciation success depends on how much the learners can imitate English pronunciation accents.The study also highlights that there are no significant differences in perceptions between females and males in the importance of learning pronunciation, learning pronunciation for communication needs, and pronunciation learning for native accents.
This study has several limitations.A mixed method, using a survey design and case study, was adopted to answer the research questions.We only recruited three Islamic higher education students from two provinces in Indonesia as participants in the study.This is due to the consideration of easy access and the minimization of funding.Our sample size may not be representative of all English department students of higher education in Indonesia; therefore, we avoided overgeneralizing the result and recommended other researchers conduct similar research with a large sample.In addition, all students who participated in this study were enrolled in the English department and have studied English pronunciation.Despite the limitation, this study's findings may imply stakeholders and pedagogy: (1) By knowing the results from this study that students positively responded and perceived pronunciation learning attitude, lecturers should find more appropriate teaching media to engage students in pronunciation learning.One example of the teaching strategy is the technology integration lesson, which can help lecturers increase students' pronunciation awareness (Zeybek, 2018).( 2) Students must understand how the learning attitude could influence pronunciation proficiency.(3) It contributes to English pedagogy about the important role of a positive pronunciation learning attitude that leads the students to have proper pronunciation.

( 5 )
Pronunciation learning is very useful.It can help me pronounce phonetic correctly and make it easier for the other people to understand what I'm saying.(S22).

Table 1 .
Students' attitudes toward the importance of learning pronunciation.

Table 2 .
Students' attitudes toward learning pronunciation for communication needs.

Table 3 .
Students' attitudes of pronunciation learning for native accent.

Table 4 .
Independent sample t-test results of the differences in students' attitudes toward the importance of pronunciation learning regarding gender.

Table 5 .
Mann-Whitney U test results of the differences in students' attitudes to learning pronunciation for communication needs regarding gender.

Table 6 .
Independent sample t-test results of the differences in students' attitudes of pronunciation learning for native accents regarding gender.