INTRODUCTIONPronunciation tends to take a back seat in both second language acquisition research and secondary and higher education all over the world (Underhill 2013). When learners study English at university, however, they generally receive proper pronunciation coaching, which can help them acquire a more native-like pronunciation. Once they have acquired this, however, the challenge is maintaining it. This study explored how learners go about maintaining their pronunciation by investigating the influence of the discontinuation of pronunciation teaching on the upkeep of a near-native accent, based on an RP pronunciation model, in advanced Dutch learners of English.In particular, this study investigated whether the English pronunciation of those advanced Dutch learners improved, deteriorated, or remained stable over time once explicit pronunciation had ceased, by means of a longitudinal study of the speech of Dutch university students who were studying English. The speech of a cohort of learners was sampled at several points during their undergraduate degree by means of making audio recordings of several tasks; importantly, the explicit phonetics and RP pronunciation instruction they received during their degree stopped after the second year. The main sub-questions that were investigated were, therefore, whether degree year and task type were of any influence on the learners' pronunciation. This study also explored any possibly confounding influence of the amount of exposure to English learners received by taking into account the number of English-taught courses that they took during their undergraduate degree, and whether they spent a term abroad in an English-speaking country. The hypothesis was that the pronunciation of third-year students would become less native-like than it was before, with their pronunciation not being as native-like as it was at the end of the second year, but more native-like than at the end of the first year. Read speech was expected to be more native-like in pronunciation than spontaneous speech, and the possible confounder of having more exposure to English in general, whether through courses or going abroad, was expected to have a positive influence on the students' pronunciation.In attaining L2 proficiency, even relatively limited explicit instruction has been shown to be beneficial to a learner's pronunciation. Lord (2005) and Lipinska (2013) found that explicitly teaching segmental phonetics improved learners' production, while