Effects of Imitation Training Methods on Chinese EFL Learners’ Production of English Intonation

Intonation plays an important role in speech intelligibility and is difficult to be acquired by L2 learners. Previous studies exploring L2 intonation have generally focused on the learners' intonational performance in perception and/or production tasks. Imitation has been known as one of the significant approaches for L2 learners to master intonation. Listen-and-repeat (LAR) and repetitive synchronous imitation (RSI) have been fully studied and applied before, while there have been fewer studies on delayed repeating task (DRT) and a lack of comparisons with other methods. The current study explored whether the three imitation training methods help Chinese EFL learners improve their production of English intonation. Sixty non-English majors were randomly divided into three groups for three training methods, i.e., LAR, RSI, and DRT. The results indicate that: 1) Chinese EFL learners' English intonation was improved immediately after the training regardless of training methods; 2) There were improvements in the three training methods regardless of their proficiency of oral English; 3) There was not extended improvement on selective question and enumeration in the retention test.