The Role of Delayed Output on Second/Foreign Language Pronunciation in Children

Abstract

Effective language teaching can provide children with the satisfaction of succeeding in the challenge of learning a foreign language. All these issues must be taken under consideration when researching children and their teachers. Production training is under-investigated in L2 training studies, and despite the small number of studies with adults, there are very few studies of children. Even fewer attempts have been made to compare classroom instruction with computer-assisted training. The results show that output practice has an advantage over delayed production after only three weeks of training particularly in less marked sounds. Findings also show that learning English before the age of puberty does not warrant accent-free pronunciation.