Hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned words improves L2 pronunciation: Evidence from training Chinese adolescents with French words:

Though research has shown that rhythmic training is beneficial for phonological speech processing, little empirical work has been carried out to assess whether rhythmic training in the classroom can help to improve pronunciation in a second language. This study tests the potential benefits of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words for the acquisition of pronunciation patterns by Chinese adolescents. In a between-subjects training experiment with a pretest/posttest design, 50 Chinese adolescents either repeated new French words while clapping out their rhythmic structure (clapping condition) or only repeated the words (non-clapping condition). Participants’ oral production before and after training was (1) perceptually rated for accentedness by two French native speakers and (2) acoustically analysed for final syllable duration. While the results showed an only near-significant improvement from pretest to posttest in accentedness ratings for the clapping group, a significant improvement ...