What If I Mispronounce o Word?: A Linguistic Case Study of Pronunciation Anxiety

Foreign language anxiety is the state of feeling emotional or physical discomfort for language learners (Kralova & Mala, 2018). Language learners’ anxious emotional reaction to a foreign language is often remedied by reducing and balancing the affective filter by language experts and educators (Yaoqing, 2021). From a scientific perspective, the current research indicates that pronunciation anxiety is quite common among language learners regardless of their proficiency levels (Kafes, 2018). Within the same context, this research study specifically investigates the underlying motives that cause pronunciation anxiety among highly-accomplished language learners. A speech analysis technique, an effective method of applied linguistics, is applied to analyze the underlying reasons that cause pronunciation anxiety. This linguistic study hypothesizes that Turkish EFL learners mostly experience pronunciation anxiety in the English language when they come across sounds that are not present in the Turkish language. Thus, it is significant to investigate the impact of the first language interference on pronunciation anxiety levels of language learners through an effective speech analysis technique. This scientific study highlights the correlation between pronunciation anxiety and first language interference. The results indicate that there is not direct correlation between first language interference and pronunciation anxiety; however, the participants of this study showed consistency in the fact that Turkish language learners experience pronunciation difficulty when they come across with sounds that are not present in their native language, Turkish. In parallel, other cross-linguistic interactions across other language combinations can be explored for future research studies