Exploring the impact of audio self-modelling on Chinese as a foreign language students' tone pronunciation skill, self-efficacy, and motivation

Background studyChinese tone pronunciation instruction gains increasingly attention and various instructional strategies have been studied to develop effective tones in students. Students usually listen to successful pronunciation stimuli provided by the teacher or peers, to be copied by themselves. However, individuals seem more sensitive to learn from their own voice to develop adequate tone pronunciation. Self-Modelling is an instructional strategy that builds on learning from ones' own behaviour to develop target behaviours. Most available research builds on visual cues; hence the label Visual Self Modelling (VSM) that presents learners with videoclips of their own behaviour. VSM had been found to be successful to develop a range of skills. However, when focusing on language pronunciation, audio cues are to be preferred to direct the modelling process. This inspired the authors to the design of audio self-modelling (ASM) that starts from recordings of students' pronunciation. These auditory recordings are hypothesized to be more appropriate as a base for self-modelling.ObjectivesThe purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of ASM when training Chinese as a foreign language students' tone pronunciation (focus on contour, pitch, duration. Additionally, the study explores the impact of ASM on students' self-efficacy and motivation and the relationship between students' tone pronunciation skill, self-efficacy, and motivation.MethodA quasi-experimental design was adopted, involving 26 students in a six-week intervention to study the improvement of their pronunciation of Chinese tones at word level. Seventeen students in the experimental condition were trained via ASM; the other nine students studied pronunciation as usual on the base of teacher provided pronunciation stimuli and corrective feedback. Students in the ASM were also individually interviewed about their learning experience.ResultsAnalysis of the quantitative pre- and post-tests scores show that ASM results in a significantly higher posttest score for in each of the tone criteria as compared to the control group (contour, pitch and duration). Also, students' self-efficacy and motivation improved to a significantly higher extent in the ASM research condition. No significant correlations were found between CFL students' tone pronunciation performance and their self-efficacy and motivation. Analysis of the interview data further indicated that CFL students put forward positive attitudes and perceptions about ASM, next to some concerns.ConclusionThe significant findings present empirical evidence as to the efficacy of ASM as an instructional strategy to develop L2 skills, and push the idea to adopt self-modelling on the base of person auditory recordings to direct L2 pronunciation instruction. What is currently known about the subject matterThe implications of study findings for practitionersThere are four tones plus a neutral tone in Modern Chinese.Chinese tones are very difficult to acquire for non-native Chinese people.Listening to one's own voice has been proved to be effective for learning musicWhat the paper adds to thisIt demonstrates that listening to one's own adaptive voice is effective for learning Chinese tones.Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) students feel more confident when listening to their own adaptive pronunciation.Individuals learning a foreign language can consider using audio self-modelling-listening to their own adaptive pronunciation-as a strategy to practice their pronunciation.