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Many things contribute to learning pronunciation, from students’ ages, motivation, and personality which depend on the learners themselves to the quality of the teaching and the students’ first language which are outside factors.
The Age of the Learner
We’ve all observed how easily babies and very young children learn languages. They just seem to absorb the sounds and words they hear around them and, little by little, learn to imitate them accurately. Linguists call this time in a child’s life, lasting up to the age of about 12 to 14 years, the critical period for language acquisition. Children can learn the sounds of language more naturally than adults and can approach native speaker pronunciation, but only if they are surrounded by the language and have many chances to hear its pronunciation. Young children who hear English only a couple of hours a week lose much of their learning advantage.
Motivation
Learners in any subject area tend to make more progress if they want to learn. No teacher can force students to learn if they’re not motivated.  Three general sets of goals or desires have been suggested that can motivate students in language learning (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010, p 21):
° Learners want to be accepted into a group that uses the language. The group might still recognize the learners as “outsiders,” but they can function well in the group. This is sometimes called integrative motivation.
° They want to be accepted as real members of the group. They don’t want to be thought of as “outsiders.” This is called assimilative motivation.
° They want to be able to use the language to reach a goal: To get a job, to conduct business, to pass a test, or to travel easily in a foreign country. This is called instrumental motivation.
Personality and Aptitude
Teachers sometimes assume that more outgoing learners will be able to learn pronunciation better than shyer students, and there may be some truth to this. Confident students might speak more and be more willing to try new sounds, and this extra practice could help them improve their pronunciation. However, this improvement is certainly not guaranteed. Some outgoing students may be producing a lot of language, but they may also be jumping ahead without paying attention to the accuracy of their pronunciation.  Some more introverted students might actually be thinking carefully about sounds and practicing “within themselves,” even if they don’t speak much in class. Don’t underestimate the quiet students.
Another aspect of personality that can affect pronunciation is the degree to which a person is willing or able to change the way he or she sounds. Most of us have been speaking and listening to language in the same, familiar way since we learned to talk. Our voice and our pronunciation are a central part of the way we see ourselves.
Finally, some people seem to have more of an aptitude or talent for learning language or imitating pronunciation than others. We say that some people “have a good ear” for language. What seems like a natural talent may be partly due to special motivation, encouragement from parents or teachers, or growing up in an environment where there are many opportunities to hear and learn other languages. In fact, there’s no magical ability possessed by some people but not others that determines whether someone can be a successful language learner.
Methods and Quality of Teaching
The kind of teaching students have experienced, both in amount and quality, has a strong influence on their learning. Have they received a lot of training in pronunciation, only a little, or perhaps almost none at all? How much practice have they had? Was it effective practice using a variety of activities or entirely “repeat after me” without effective feedback from the teacher? Were the teachers interested in pronunciation, or did they consider it to be only unnecessary fluff? Is it even possible that their past teachers have given them false information or provided an extremely inaccurate model? The quality of teaching that students receive certainly affects the quality of their learning.
Exposure to the Target Language
Learners who live in an English-speaking country where they are constantly surrounded by the language will be more familiar with the sounds and melodies they’re trying to imitate than those who have few chances to hear spoken English—perhaps only during English classes for a few hours each week.
The Influence of the Learner’s Language
A learner’s first language (often referred to as the L1) has a strong influence on the way he or she learns the pronunciation of a second language (referred to as the L2). Often this influence is helpful, such as when some sounds are very similar in the two languages.

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A more realistic goal,and one that more and more teachers and reasearchers recommend, is intelligible pronunciation, speaking in a way that most listeners, both native and nonnative speakers, can understand without too much effort or confusion. It's not a bad thing if you can still tell that the speaker comes from a particular country or region, as long as the speaker can be easily understood by others ( Celce-Murcia,Brinton and Goodwin,2010.
To be truly intelligible to a wide range of listeners, and not just to willing listeners of their own language background speakers need to come fairly close to some kind of recognized standard, whether it's one of the major native-speaker varieties or nonnative variety of pronunciation that is easily understood by listeners from many backgrounds. As responsible teachers, we must make sure we don't set the bar too low.

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Accuracy refers to how correct learners’ use of the language system is, including their use of grammar, pronunciation and grammar. In other words, accuracy is the correct use of tenses, verb forms, colocations and colloquialisms, among other things. For many EFL learners, accuracy is considered very important, and one of the main responsibilities of an EFL teacher is thought to be to correct errors and ensure the highest level of accuracy.

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Fluency refers to how well a learner communicates meaning rather than how many mistakes they make in grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary.

In other words, the ease with which a learner can speak and how well they can communicate without pauses or hesitations, without needing to search for words or phrases, without having to consider the language of what they are about to say.

It’s important to note that a person who is fluent may not necessarily be 100 % accurate but they are generally still comprehensible.

Fluency activities focus not so much on how the students are communicating but what they are communicating. Examples of fluency activities are conversations, roleplays, debates and projects.

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Effects of Differences Between First Language and Second Language

Merging. When learners hear unfamiliar sounds in a new language, they tend to interpret the sounds of the new language in terms of the categories of their original language. The learner’s brain may hear two sounds as being the same when they’re actually considered separate sounds in the new language. This is called merging and leads to pronunciation errors.  For example, many languages don’t have separate vowel sounds like the ones in reach (/iy/) and rich (/ɪ/). Speakers of these languages may merge the two sounds and pronounce them both in the same way.
Substitution. When learners hear a new sound that doesn’t match any of the sounds they know, they often substitute a familiar sound that is somewhat similar and easier for them to produce. For example, the first sound in think and three is found in relatively few languages in the world. Speakers of languages that don’t have this sound often substitute /s/, /f/, or /t/ so that think sounds like sink, fink, or tink.
The effect on intelligibility. The processes of substitution and merging can cause serious problems for learners’ intelligibility. When listeners expect to hear one sound but actually hear a different one, communication can break down.
Problems with Individual Words
Spelling. English has many words with irregular or unpredictable spellings, and this can lead students to mispronounce those words. For example, if students learn the words rain, plain, and maintain, they will naturally assume that the letters ain must represent /eyn/. Then if they see the written word mountain, they may mistakenly pronounce it /mawnteyn/.
Borrowed words. Many languages have borrowed words from English, adapting their pronunciation to fit the sound system of the borrowing language.
Fossilization
One of the most stubborn problems that we face in teaching pronunciation is fossilization. Fossilization is a process that occurs when a language learner progresses to a certain point but then has a hard time making further progress. For example, a student who has been studying English for many years might still not be able to differentiate /v/ as in very and /b/ as in berry; this error just seems to have become a permanent part of the person’s English.
Hypercorrection
This happens when a student has learned a rule and tries to apply it, but applies it in too many cases. For example, a common error among Korean learners is to substitute /p/ for /f/, since /f/  doesn’t exist in the Korean language. The predictable error is to say pan instead of fan or punny instead of funny. But sometimes a learner has been concentrating so hard on not saying /p/—on saying /f/ instead—that he or she sometimes says /f/ even when the correct sound actually should have been /p/. The speaker might say fan instead of pan.
Learning to Hear
Being able to hear the difference between sounds in a new language is as important as being able to produce the sounds. However, hearing new sounds is not always easy. How we as adults hear sounds is a result of the way we’ve become used to hearing and classifying them in our own language. We don’t “hear” and pay attention to all the speech sounds that come into our ears— only the ones that we’re used to hearing.  Our brains developed a phonological filter that lets us hear the sounds of our own language very efficiently but “filters out” and ignores unfamiliar, unnecessary sounds. As adults, when we hear new sounds, it’s difficult to identify or understand them—we’re still hearing through the filter of our first language.
Feelings That Can Stand in the Way
Learners’ feelings about language and pronunciation sometimes make it harder for them to develop accurate pronunciation, especially for students who don’t have a choice about learning English.
Learning Pronunciation Takes Time
Pronouncing sounds involves both our minds and our bodies. When you learn new sounds, you need to learn to move the muscles of your mouth in new ways and change the pronunciation habits you’ve built up all through your life. This isn’t easy, and like learning any other muscular activity, it takes a long time.  Your mouth also needs to build up muscle memory the ability to do something more easily after practicing it many times. Your muscles begin to “remember” how to move in a certain way because they’ve done it so often.

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To teach pronunciation effectively, you need several types of knowledge:
° You need to know the facts about pronunciation: How speakers’ mouths move when they produce the sounds of language, and how word stress, rhythm, connected speech, and intonation work.
°  You need to understand and be able to predict the kinds of problems your students might have with pronunciation and why they happen.
°  You need to know many ways to teach pronunciation to your students, adapting your methods to fit them and their needs, and helping them practice effectively to overcome any problems they might have (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010).
° Include more than just “repeat after me.” Having students listen to a recording or to the teacher’s voice and then repeat is a useful part of a pronunciation lesson, but by itself it is not enough.
°  Encourage students to use more than one of their senses, which is more effective anyway. We can use many different ways of learning—through sight, sound, and movement—to help students understand and remember better.
°  Keep lessons practical. For most students, even adults, theory and technical explanations are hard to understand and are easily forgotten.
°  Include communicative practice whenever possible. Students need to work toward using their new pronunciation in real speech.
° Train students to become independent and autonomous learners. Our students won’t be with us forever.  If we can help them build up their own skills in listening, imitating, and monitoring their own pronunciation, it will be a big help to them in their future learning.