The Relationship between Pronunciation Self-Efficacy Sources and Pronunciation Learning Strategy Use

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the subjects’ four sources of English pronunciation self-efficacy and their pronunciation learning strategy use. The subjects were 429 Chinese English majors from a university in China. The sub-dimensions of the two instruments were first validated through a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The group variable (i.e., the three clusters identified by the k-means cluster analysis) was the dependent variable, and the four sources of pronunciation self-efficacy were entered as the independent variables in a discriminant analysis. The results revealed that three out of the four sources of English pronunciation self-efficacy (i.e., ‘enactive mastery experience’, ‘vicarious experience’, and ‘verbal persuasion’) contributed to differentiating the subjects into the three clusters (groups) of high-, low-, and medium users of pronunciation learning strategies, with an overall classification accuracy ratio of 61.6%. Some implications concerning consciousness-raising activities, task repetition, and corrective feedback for teaching English pronunciation were discussed based on the results of the study.