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

Abstract

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 was obtained for acoustic durational measures. Individual musical abilities did not interact significantly in either of the two analyses, and working memory interacted significantly only with accentedness. These results show that a short training session in which clapping is used to highlight the prosodic structure of words can help improve pronunciation in a foreign language.

The Efficacy of Gesture on Second Language Pronunciation: An Exploratory Study of Handclapping as a Classroom Instructional Tool

“…Several experimental studies indeed have appeared to confirm the benefits of gestures for L2 learners’ pronunciation of suprasegmental features. Zhang, Baills, and Prieto (2018), for example, found that Chinese monolinguals learned the rhythmic patterns of French words better through the use of handclapping. Metaphoric pitch gestures (Yuan, González‐Fuente, Baills, & Prieto, 2019) and rhythmic beat gestures (Gluhareva & Prieto, 2017) have also been reported to help L2 learners improve intonation patterns in Spanish and accentedness in English, respectively.…”

Do gestures during training facilitate L2 lexical stress acquisition by Dutch learners of Spanish?

“…The absence of a significant difference between gesture conditions might be explained in several ways. Starting with the study that is perhaps most similar to ours, Zhang, Baills and Prieto [24] investigated the effect of hand clapping on lexical stress production by Chinese learners of French. Interestingly, they found a significant improvement between pre and post-test for the clapping condition when examining relative syllable durations, but no significant difference for accentedness ratings.…”

“…Finally, Zhang, Baills and Prieto [24] investigated the benefits of hand clapping in a lexical stress training for Chinese learners of French. They compared a group that watched a video in which someone used handclapping to mark the prominence of syllables with a group that watched videos without clapping.…”

“…In addition, we limit the difficulty of the learning task by using cognates. In [24], the meaning of the newly learned French words was not transparent to the Chinese learners, which entails that participants were perhaps also focused on learning the meaning of the word, as well as the correct pronunciation.…”

“…Thus, our research question is: Does instruction modality affect L2 learners' production of non-native lexical stress? We hypothesize: 1) Given that the use of gestures is helpful in the acquisition of certain segments [16,27], as well as suprasegments [22,24], using gestures in the audio-visual training will be more beneficial than not including them. 2) Participants might benefit more from a metaphoric gesture than from a beat gesture during L2 lexical stress training.…”