Cultural Identity Preservation and EFL Native-like Pronunciation

Abstract

It is evident that many socio-cultural factors seem to have an impact on learners' pronunciation native likeness. Thus, the current study attempts at exploring at what extent does cultural identity preservation affect EFL native like pronunciation? and what is students’ attitude towards their pronunciation and teachers’ attitude towards students’ pronunciation. In this research, it is hypothesized that there is a strong relationship between cultural identity preservation and students’ attitude towards acquiring an EFL native like pronunciation. It is opted for a descriptive method, using both a students' questionnaire and a teachers' questionnaire. The students' uestionnaire was distributed to seventy-eight Master1 EFL students at the Department of FL, University of Mila, whereas the teachers' questionnaire was administered to ten teachers of EFL at the University of Mila as well. Regarding the findings of this study, it is highlighted that there is no straight influence of cultural entitypreservation on EFL native-like pronunciation, yet some components of cultural identity may affect native likeness such as native language or native language accent and gender since the majority of students believe that their standard Algerian accent has an impact on their EFL native likeness indeed, and the overwhelming majority of the sample of teachers’ questionnaire said that EFL female learners master native likeness better than males. It is also to be mentioned that this research findings reveal that EFL learners think their onunciation is average and want to improve it. Ultimately, this research offers some valuable recommendations for both eachers and students with the purpose of exploring the effect cultural identity has on EFL pronunciation, and giving more attention to EFL pronunciation teaching field.