Bangladeshi ESL Students’ Attitude Towards Learner Autonomy in Pronunciation Learning

Abstract

Pronunciation is a vital skill for successful communication. Unfortunately, due to classroom constraints, it is most often disregarded. Teachers can incorporate autonomous learning to solve this issue whereby students can take greater responsibility and practice pronunciation autonomously, both inside and outside the classroom. The first step to that is to find out how students feel about the connection between pronunciation and learner autonomy.  This study, therefore, has attempted to investigate learners' attitude towards autonomous pronunciation learning and discover what learning strategies they have at their disposal to learn pronunciation autonomously. The findings from both qualitative and quantitative methods used in this research revealed that students were enthusiastic and had a positive attitude towards autonomous pronunciation learning despite being unaware of its full extent. The results also showed that the use of learning strategies by students were at best only moderate. Such findings may imply that students need to be trained and mentored before they can undertake the full responsibility of autonomous pronunciation learning both within and beyond the classroom.