The Procedure

3.3.1. Shadowing Materials

Judging from the students’ current English level, the researcher gleaned suitable short video clips from two well-known English learning websites, Real English (www.real-english.com) and ABA English (www.abaenglish.com), preferably less than three minutes. Theme-based, naturally-produced, and face-to-face conversations in daily life situations were prior selection for the shadowing materials. Practicing with such type of materials, students were supposed to find listening questions in conversation type easier than before. Besides, it would provide students with a chance to be exposed to the real-life context where authentic English was spoken, and probably equip students with better English communication skills in the future. The following script, extracted from one of the video clips in Real English, is an example of the shadowing materials.

Eposode 1

Man: What nationality are you?

Woman 1: Austrian.

Man: And what’s your name?

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Woman 1: Christine.

Man: And what’s your name?

Woman 2: Barbara.

Man: Are you from Austrian, too?

Woman 2: Yes.

Man: Thank you very much.

Eposode 2

Man 1: This is Samir.

Woman: Hi, Samir. What nationality are you, Samir?

Man 2: I’m Indian.

Eposode 3

Woman 1: What nationality are you?

Woman 2: German.

Woman 1: Where are you from?

Woman 2: Germany.

In case not to deviate from the current curriculum too much, the reading passages and the example sentences from the textbook (LungTeng Version Book II) were also be included. Students were required to do shadowing practice at home with the model recordings provided from the textbook publisher. Though the materials from the textbook seemed much longer and more difficult than the online materials, students were supposed to get familiar with the content and new words after the reading section of a lesson had been covered by the teacher. Moreover, the model recordings were available in both normal and slow version. Students were allowed to choose the speed

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they were able to follow up. Therefore, doing shadowing with the textbook materials, especially the reading passages, was not too challenging for students, low-achievers in particular. In fact, those materials in different types, including sentence, conversation, and passage, corresponded to the styles of the three listening test sections in GEPT.

Hence, using the above-mentioned materials would theoretically have a positive impact on Experimental Group’s listening comprehension shown in their post-test.

3.3.2. In-class Shadowing Practice

The whole experiment lasted for one month with both in-class shadowing practice and out-of-class shadowing assignments. After the pre-test had been administrated to both groups, the students in the Experimental Group were instructed how to do shadowing practice. The type of shadowing used in the present study was pretty much the same as phonemic shadowing, proposed by Schweda Nicholson (1990), which was easier for beginners to practice. The researcher not only demonstrated the shadowing techniques herself but also played the instruction videos from YouTube. Then, students were asked to practice right after the instruction in order to make sure their fully understanding of the shadowing practice procedures. The entire procedures are shown in Table 3.

For the total times of shadowing with the same material, Shiki et al. (2010) indicated that continuing shadowing more than four or five times resulted in less effective reproduction rate. Thus, students were encouraged to do shadowing practice less than four times. However, owing to the mixed-level class, students were also told to flexibly adjust the times of practice based on their individual progress. The frequency of the in-class shadowing practice depended on the course schedule, two to three times per week, which didn’t affect the original curriculum too much. A total of eight recordings were supposed to be handed in.

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Table 3. Shadowing procedure used in the experiment.

Step Description

1 Students were introduced to the shadowing model video clip.

2 The teacher explained the content of the clip.

3 Students formed into pairs, written as Student A and B hereafter.

4 Student A played the shadowing video using his or her own mobile phone.

5 Student B started to listen and do shadowing practice for a few times.

6 When satisfied, student B started to record his or her own voice with the other mobile phone.

7 Student A and B exchanged the roles.

8 Student A and B both uploaded their best recording files onto the designated Google Drive shared folder.

9 The researcher collected the recorded data and checked whether all the students had successfully completed shadowing practice.

10 Those who failed to finish the required recording in class were asked to do a make-up recording by themselves at home.

3.3.3. Out-of-class Shadowing Assignments

Apart from the in-class shadowing practice, the Experimental Group was also required to finish the shadowing assignments at home once every two weeks, two assignments in total. With mobile phone, students could simply upload their final products onto the designated Google Drive folder once they had completed the recorded shadowing assignments. Students were encouraged to not only listen to the model voice recordings as many times as they can but also do shadowing for two to three times before recording. Wang and Smith (2013) proposed that, in general, even though

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mobile-assisted tasks were somewhat more enjoyable than traditional course assignments, students were still reluctant to complete those tasks. Wang and Smith (2013) further suggested that those tasks be either less challenging or compulsory, graded requirements. Hence, the model recordings covering the textbook reading section were selected and all the assignments were graded by the teacher researcher.

3.3.4. The Control Group

After the pre-test had been administrated, the Control Group received usual in-class listening training without doing shadowing practice. They simply needed to complete the listening exercise of each lesson from the textbook, which the Experimental Group was required to complete as well. One month later, they were asked to perform the post-test.