Indonesian EFL Students’ Difficulties in Recognizing English Letters

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the difficulties of Indonesian undergraduate students in recognizing English letters at one public Islamic higher education institution in Jambi Province, Indonesia as the basis for designing pronunciation teaching strategies for English lecturers. Using a qualitative methodology that attempts to investigate and understand human issues in a particular group (Harrison et al., 2017), 4 participants were interviewed. through semi-structured interview questions. The interviews were analyzed and compared along four dimensions of EFL English pronunciation mastery factors: motivation, attitude, first language pronunciation interference, and phonetic ability. The findings of this study provide evidence for lecturers on the importance of introducing pronunciation class in the English study program in the earlier years of study to improve students' English pronunciation ability. Implication and limitation of research are provided.