Mastering EFL Pronunciation in North Macedonia and Poland: A Quantitative Questionnaire Approach

Abstract

This paper examines the issue of the mastering of EFL pronunciation among 144 students of English studies in North Macedonia (n=34) and Poland (n=110) by means of a questionnaire consisting of: 23 scalar judgments and 4 closed questions. The responses to the questions provide information on: the best place to study pronunciation, the preferred English accent, the types of communication problems and the general awareness of the informants’ own pronunciation problems. The results of the judgments confirm a very traditional approach to the notion of accent in a FL in which close proximity to a native speaker norm is regarded as an ideal and passing for a native-speaker is aspired to. These findings shed some light on university students’ phonetic priorities and might be significant for teachers of phonetics in these two European countries and beyond them. at the University of Rzeszów in Poland. Her research concentrates on Polish-accented speech of university students of English and methodology of teaching phonetics to adults in EFL context. She has co-authored two course-books on English pronunciation: How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck? : English pronunciation practice book (Mańkowska et al., 2009) and Sally Meets Harry: Primer to English Pronunciation and Spelling (Nowacka et al., 2011).